by James Traub
Adams reached Cincinnati on November 8. The front pages of the papers contained almost nothing save news of the events surrounding his visit. The Ohio Weekly Journal offered a poem in honor of the great man: “Old Massachusetts eagle yet! / Hail! From his aerie’d rock.” The cornerstone laying took place the following day. A torrential rain began that morning and continued all day. Nevertheless, a vast crowd formed on Sixth Street, where a banner had been raised: “John Quincy Adams, Defender of the Rights of Man.” Thousands followed the procession to the hilltop site—later renamed Mount Adams—where the former president laid the cornerstone atop copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and gave a brief address. Among all the splendid monuments erected in the United States, he observed, not one was a “lighthouse of the skies.” The Astronomical Society, he declared, as rain washed the ink from his speech, “have determined to wipe the reproach from the fair fame of our country.” That night, as the rain abated, Adams was escorted by a mile-long torchlight parade to a temperance tea where two thousand people were said to be gathered under a tent, with two thousand more milling around outside.
The following day, Adams delivered his oration at the city’s Wesleyan Methodist church. Fortunately for his audience, Adams cut half of the planned material, though he still spoke for two hours. He traced the development of astronomy from the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Arabs to Copernicus, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and Newton, and then onward to the discovery of new planets in his own time. It was a stupendous display of erudition that must have strained the attention of everyone save Professor Mitchell himself.
The rapturous reception Adams enjoyed prompted a good deal of editorial reflection. “He was never a popular favorite,” wrote the abolitionist Weekly Herald. “His greater talents, and his services to his country, generally commanded respect, but excited no enthusiasm.” He was today, the author went on sardonically, the same man he had been five years earlier, “when he was named, but to be cursed, and when to vindicate his course, was almost equivalent to a loss of caste.” Now he was cheered as a Defender of the Rights of Man. Why? Because abolitionism, once the cause of a radical fringe, had gained widespread acceptance.
A less sour appraisal came from the Daily Advocate and Advertiser of Pittsburgh, where Adams ended his tour and where workers had decided, as a gesture of regard, to close their factories for the day. “Somewhat of the respect which was manifested was doubtless due and given to the ex-President,” the editors wrote, “but the heartiness with which it was given was owing to esteem and affection for the man—for his undaunted spirit—his strict integrity—perseverance in duty—and true republicanism. . . . He has met the sober second thought of the people and it has at length done him justice.”
As the first president to have gone back to work after his tenure, Adams had given himself the opportunity, as none of his predecessors had, to benefit from a “sober second thought.” He had changed the meanings Americans attached to him. No longer the dynastic New Englander who represented an archaic Federalist America, Adams had become the dauntless standard-bearer of the very modern cause of abolitionism. At the same time, his rootedness in the republican principles of the founders also placed him on a pedestal in the national pantheon. Indeed, the very fact that he had not changed, that he had stood for principles when they were despised and lived to see them vindicated, offered the most powerful evidence of his greatness of character.
Adams received a delegation of black citizens in Cincinnati who wished to thank him for his role in defending their rights. Characteristically, he explained that the Amistad case had nothing to do with slavery and reminded them that Congress had no power in peace time to abolish slavery. Adams, of course, deprecated fulsome praise. In his journal he pronounced himself thoroughly disgusted with the reverence that had been showered on his head. But that wasn’t quite so. After sitting through yet another lavish introduction in Covington, Kentucky, Adams told his audience that everywhere he had gone he had been met by citizens “disposed to manifest towards me such feelings as I know not how to allude to without emotion; such as through a long life it has been my lot to experience very little of; such as, in their extent, I had not the most distant idea, expectation or belief that I deserved.”
CHAPTER 37
Let Justice Be Done Though the Heavens Fall
(1843–1845)
EARLY ONE MORNING IN DECEMBER 1843, JOSHUA GIDDINGS, Adams’ beloved protégé, reached the House and found Adams sitting silently at his desk. The old man looked exhausted and deeply depressed. According to Giddings’ diary, Adams said that he “had become nervous and unable to sleep. He spoke most feelingly, declaring that our government had become the most perfect despotism of the Christian world.” Adams felt that he could no longer take the floor to do battle against the slave power. “His hand was palsied and trembling,” Giddings noted; “his voice was somewhat feeble and broken, his movements denoted age, but his intellect appeared unimpaired.” Adams was, he said, prepared, as ever, to do his duty.
The elation Adams had felt in Cincinnati had long since dissipated. Darkness seemed to be gathering over him, his cause, and the nation itself. The year before, Adams and the zealots of Abolition House had gotten within inches of finally overturning the gag, losing 96–93. But John Tyler’s divisive presidency had been a disaster for the Whigs, and the election of 1842 had restored the Democrats to power in the House. A forty-seat majority became a sixty-seat deficit, one of the biggest midterm swings in American history. In fact, the numbers were even worse than they looked, because in the decennial reapportionment of 1840 Congress had voted to reduce the total number of seats from 242 to 224. The Whig caucus was thus smaller both in absolute numbers and in percentage of seats. In an exchange of letters toward the end of 1842, Adams and Charles Francis had agreed that the best chance for ending the gag had come and gone.
Yet at the very moment when the anti-gag movement appeared to have reached its limit, something happened. When Adams once again submitted a resolution to rescind the gag rule in early December 1843, he lost by only four votes. He got the votes of virtually all the Northerners, Whig and Democrat, as well as of a few Southern Whigs. This old man seemed to have at last worn out his younger, and far more numerous, adversaries. The most unexpected convert was Adams’ archrival, Henry Wise, who told court reporters that “henceforth, and forever, he ceased to contend in that war which was being carried on in the House by certain men against the South.” Wise never explained his change of heart, though he may have concluded that he could stand on far more solid ground if he defended the right of Southern states to keep their peculiar institution than if he continued to prevent Northerners from submitting futile petitions in protest of the practice. That calculus would itself be a testimony to Adams’ success in making the gag one of the great political issues of the day. After yet another debate over whether an anti-slavery petition should be tabled or referred to committee, Speaker White agreed to appoint a special committee on the rules chaired by Adams; Wise, as good as his word, consented.
Later in December, Adams presented a bombshell: a petition not from individuals but from the state of Massachusetts seeking a constitutional amendment overturning the “three-fifths clause,” which had served as the foundation for the South’s disproportionate political power. In some sense Adams himself had initiated the resolution, for it had been shepherded through the statehouse by Charles Francis Adams, now a state senator. Another furious debate sprang up in the House, but Wise agreed that it should be referred to a special committee—separate from the new rules committee—also chaired by Adams. The former president used this committee to send up more fireworks, including a proposal to conduct a survey fixing precisely the value of the human property held by slave owners in the House. He wasn’t going to win that motion, but he wrote to Charles Francis asking him to do the research as quickly as possible.
In January 1844, Adams submitted a report from his rules committee propo
sing to eliminate the gag. For the next two months, the entire chamber was convulsed by one last ferocious debate on the subject. James Dellet of Alabama, a new member, joined in the general assault on Adams by quoting from a speech the latter had given in Pittsburgh at the end of his Western trip. Adams had told a group of black citizens that “the day of your redemption” was bound to come. “It may come in peace or it may come in blood; but whether in peace or in blood, LET IT COME.” That, said Dellet emphatically, was the true agenda of the anti-gag activists. Not satisfied with the effect he had produced, Dellet read the quote a second time.
Adams had vowed to keep his peace, but this was too much. Without rising from his seat, he said, with a sudden show of vehemence, “I say now, let it come.” Dellet responded by reminding the House what Adams meant by that expression, and Adams, still planted in his chair, roared, “Though it cost the blood of millions of white men, let it come! Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” That was a shocking thing to say. The members might have expected as much from the single-minded Giddings, but not from the venerable ex-president. “A sensation of horror ran through the slave-holders,” Giddings wrote. Adams had entertained this prospect in the privacy of his diary, but he had not been prepared to say such a thing in the House. Adams almost certainly did not premeditate this outburst; he had simply been unable to check, or decided not to check, the intense feelings that otherwise showed themselves only in the quiver of his lip.
At the same time, Adams was orchestrating discussion of the Massachusetts resolution in the special committee. He adroitly proposed that the committee resolve that the time was not yet ripe for the proposed constitutional amendment. He quickly won unanimous consent and then assigned himself to draft the committee report. The report was a battering ram aimed at slavery itself. Adams assailed the three-fifths clause as a gross violation of the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence, which, in turn, rested on the great truth of the gospel that all human beings are equal before God. Adams was still careful to say that the Declaration obliged states to abolish slavery “as soon as practicable” rather than right away. Yet the report represented a remarkable evolution in Adams’ own thinking—and this at the age of seventy-six. He had long worshiped the Constitution almost as holy writ, yet he now accepted that it had been warped by the compromise with slaveholders. In a letter to William Seward in May 1844, Adams wrote that all the injustices with which American society was beset had been caused by “that fatal drop of Prussic acid in the Constitution of the United States, the human chattel representation.” He wondered how heroic figures like Franklin or Roger Sherman had accepted it. Their “great delusion,” he concluded, was in not seeing how the added representation would turn the South into “an element of organized power,” a “solid compact body” certain to defeat the inevitably diffuse interests of the free states.
Adams’ report was ultimately submitted to the House—and laid on the table. But the report of the special committee on House rules had a more complicated destiny. Before taking up Adams’ motion to rescind the gag rule, the House put to a vote a rival measure to adopt all the existing rules, including the gag—and voted against. This was the closest thing to a victory the pro-petition forces had ever won. For several weeks, it appeared that Adams had finally carried the day. In late March, he received a beautiful ivory cane from Julius Pratt and Company of Meriden, Connecticut. It was topped with an American eagle inlaid in gold and a scroll bearing the words “Right of Petition Triumphant.” Written on a gold ring below was, “To John Quincy Adams.” Adams asked to have the cane returned to the Patent Office, whence it had been sent; he would, he said, inscribe the date when the gag was put to rest. It would have to wait just a little longer. Toward the end of the session, the House voted by the excruciating tally of 88–87 to decline to adopt Adams’ report, leaving everything exactly as it had been before.
On December 2, 1844, the first day of the new session, Adams notified the House that, as ever, he would move that the gag, now known as the twenty-fifth rule, be revoked. The following day, he so moved. The opposition moved to lay his resolution on the table. The motion failed, 104 to 81. Adams’ resolution was then submitted to a vote—and passed, 108 to 80. The gag rule, at long last, had fallen. Six Southerners had voted to end the gag. In his diary, Adams memorialized what must have been one of the greatest moments of his life with a simple prayer: “Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God!” Adams retrieved the ivory cane, had the pommel inscribed “12/3/44,” and returned it to the Patent Office for posterity.
ADAMS BEGAN PREPARING IN MID-JUNE 1844 TO LEAVE WASHINGTON for Quincy. He packed three sets of volumes in chests to be shipped north: committee reports and other documents issued by the House, the Senate, and the executive branch; the journals of the proceedings of each chamber; and copies of each bill and its amendments. He had two sets of most official papers, since he took home and bound up the documents issued each day, and ordered another set that was available to every legislator. He had been doing this for years and was, he believed, the only member of either house to keep so complete a record of the proceedings. Nobody cared about the official record of the chamber quite as much as he did.
On July 11, Adams’ seventy-seventh birthday, he and Louisa, herself sixty-nine years old, took the train north from Baltimore. In Jersey City, they got off the platform in the darkness and, while walking arm in arm, fell off the platform. As they plummeted through space, Adams entertained the incredible thought that, after all he had been through, he was about to die and to kill his wife in the process. In fact, they fell only a few feet, and Adams got off with only a badly bruised hip, while Louisa was not seriously hurt. As with his railroad accident a few years earlier, Adams felt that he had been providentially spared, though reminded once again of the proximity of death.
That summer Adams continued to experience his encroaching mortality. One night he toppled over and fell to his knees, reflecting that at least he hadn’t hurt himself quite as much as he had on the railroad platform. He often couldn’t sleep, and as he lay awake until the dawn, he heard each hour tolled off on his standing clock. He was often tired, and he suffered from headaches. He visited an old friend, Daniel Greenleaf, now deaf, blind, and paralytic. The friends of his youth were mostly incapacitated, like Greenleaf, or dead. Despite his own disabilities, Adams in fact remained remarkably hale for a man of his age. He went on his annual fishing trip to Cohasset and lamented that at the chowder dinner afterward the new passion for temperance had compelled the hosts to substitute coffee for claret and lemonade for Madeira.
Adams was no more ready than ever to shut off the fiery furnace within. He fretted over his political vulnerability. He was up for reelection, and at long last an abolitionist party, known as the Liberty Party, had formed in New England. Adams submitted to a “friendly interview” with party leaders, to whom he happily reiterated his differences with abolitionist doctrine. They nominated, not Adams, but a physician and state senator named Appleton Howe. Adams felt surrounded by enemies. “I must sleep in armor, and be ready to meet them in Indian warfare,” he wrote. Adams had already planned to address the Young Men’s Whig Club of Boston, where Charles Francis served as president. He had intended to defend his reputation on the Texas issue; now he was fighting for votes as well. After rebutting allegations from the aged Andrew Jackson that as secretary of state he had surrendered two hundred square miles of territory to Spain, Adams turned to the present. The great struggle between “the spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery” was coming to a head, he declared. He closed with a call to arms, though arguably a figurative one: “Young men of Boston: burnish your armor, prepare for the conflict, and I say to you, in the language of Galgacus to the ancient Britons, Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity.” He was in armor; they were in armor. The speech was a barn burner, and Adams delivered it again in Braintree and then once again in the town of North Bridgewater.
On November 6, the
newspapers announced that James Polk had defeated Henry Clay to win the presidency. Adams felt certain that he himself would lose, though a Democratic wave would hardly float a Liberty candidate to victory. In fact, he trounced his Democratic rival. Howe, the Liberty standard-bearer, got all of 4 percent of the vote. After the exhausting effort of his speeches, Adams felt deeply vindicated. But with Clay’s defeat the Whig era had come to an end.
IN OVERTURNING THE GAG, ADAMS HAD BROUGHT THE CONSUMING issue of his postpresidential career to a close. For most of his colleagues, however, the debate over petitions was little more than a distraction from the real business of the Congress. The burning question of the mid-1840s was territorial expansion, both in Mexico and in Oregon, which the United States and Great Britain continued to jointly administer a quarter of a century after Adams, as secretary of state, had negotiated a treaty to that effect. In his presidential campaign, James K. Polk had harnessed the feverish ambitions of Manifest Destiny. The convention that nominated him had adopted a resolution demanding “the re-occupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest possible period.” The “re-” in each case signified the claim that the United States already had unequivocal title to both territories, though prior administrations had failed to take what was rightly American.
