John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  South Carolina senator John Calhoun, the former vice president, assailed John Quincy’s proposal as federal intrusion in an area the Tenth Amendment reserved for the states. He pointed out correctly that the Constitutional Convention had twice rejected efforts to give the government powers to establish a national university. John Quincy countered, however, that there were no constitutional restrictions on establishing research institutions—nor did the framers restrict the national government from establishing any kind of institution in the District of Columbia. John Quincy won the day, with both houses deferring to his constitutional scholarship and approving his bill to establish the Smithsonian Institution as a public institution that remains in the hands of the American people to this day.

  Despite President Jackson’s proclamation that nullification was tantamount to treason, nullification fervor continued spreading in the South, and northerners responded with stepped-up demands for abolition. Peering into the future, John Quincy warned that “a dissolution of the Union for the cause of slavery would be followed by . . . a war between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result must be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent and desolating as this course of events . . . must be, so glorious would be its final issue, that, as God shall judge me, I dare not say that it is not to be desired.”21

  As petitions demanding an end to slavery increased, he found abolitionists as prepared as slavery proponents to dissolve the Union to further their cause. For several years, therefore, beginning with the debate over the Missouri Compromise, he had argued that the Constitution failed to give Congress any powers to interfere with slavery in any state or territory in which it already existed. It could prevent its establishment in states and territories where it did not exist but could not abolish it where it already did exist. Abolitionists argued, however, that Congress could at least eliminate slavery in the District of Columbia, where it had powers to legislate and govern, unrestricted by the Constitution.

  In the wake of three House resolutions in 1836, however, John Quincy completely changed his stance on abolition. The first two resolutions declared Congress without constitutional powers to interfere in any way with slavery in any of the states and that it “ought not” do so in the District of Columbia. John Quincy voted for both, conceding that the Constitution offered no clear guidance on abolition in the District of Columbia. The third resolution, however, stepped beyond the abolition issue by clearly abridging free speech, and John Quincy all but exploded with rage as he listened:

  All petitions, memorials, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid on the table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon .22

  Although John Quincy shot to his feet for recognition, Speaker James K. Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder, ignored him and recognized only southern congressmen. John Quincy howled for recognition, but Polk looked the other way, and after southerners had finished their presentations, he put the third resolution to a vote. The House approved it 95–82, and the Speaker shut off all further debate, preventing John Quincy from saying a word.

  “Am I gagged or am I not,” John Quincy shouted in disbelief, inadvertently giving the new rule its historic name—the Gag Rule. Southerners tried shouting him down with cries of “Order! . . . Order!!” The Speaker called out over the din, “The motion is not debatable,” and when John Quincy appealed to the House to overrule the Speaker, it sustained the Speaker 109–89. When the clerk called the Adams name, he stood: “If the House will allow me five minutes in time—”

  “Order!” shouted southerners. “Order!”

  “I hold the resolution—” John Quincy shouted above the roar, “I hold the resolution to be in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, of the rules of this House, and of the rights of my constituents.”23

  The enmity he encountered in the House grew vicious—spiteful at times. When he asked the House to recognize the death of William Wirt, who had served the nation as attorney general for twelve years in the Monroe and Adams administrations, the House refused. John Quincy called the refusal mean-spirited. “I place in perpetual opposition to me and to everything that I propose or support,” he growled, “twenty-nine members of the House and six of the Senate; and for all this and its consequences I have no compensation . . . but the bare consciousness of having done my duty.”24

  As Speaker of the House, James K. Polk of Tennessee tried to silence John Quincy Adams with the Gag Rule, which banned mention of the word “slavery” and presentation of citizen petitions to abolish the institution. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  When he opposed Ohio’s forcible takeover of disputed territory in Michigan, John Quincy reported that “the people in the territory of Michigan were grateful to me,” but he predicted that “the people of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois will hate me with perfect hatred for crossing their interests.” Of his efforts in the House, he concluded, “Never in my life have I taken in public controversies a part more suicidal to my own popularity.”25

  The Gag Rule infuriated Americans across the North and parts of the West as much as it did John Quincy, however, and hundreds of thousands of petitioners rallied to his side, arguing that if the House could gag the reading of petitions against slavery, it could gag petitions against or for anything. Women’s rights groups joined the protests and added their own petitions to the flood already inundating Congress. When Maryland’s Benjamin Chew Howard objected to the “unseemliness” of women presenting a petition, John Quincy sharpened his tongue and leaped for the rhetorical kill:

  “Why, does it follow,” he boomed, “that women are fitted for nothing but the cares of domestic life, for bearing children and cooking the food of a family, devoting all their time to the domestic circle—to promoting the immediate personal comfort of their husbands, brothers, and sons?” Louisa had apparently taught her husband to alter his thinking if not his ways. “The mere departure of woman from the duties of the domestic circle, far from being a reproach to her, is a virtue of the highest order, when it is done from purity of motive, by appropriate means, and the purpose of good.” He went on to read a petition opposing slavery from women in his constituency of Plymouth, Massachusetts. “Is this discreditable?” he asked, before thundering his oft-repeated conviction: “I do believe slavery to be a sin before the sight of God.”26

  Recognized by then as an authority on parliamentary rules, John Quincy kept finding ways around the Gag Rule, at one point asking for recognition to read the prayers of a group of Massachusetts women. When a House member objected, John Quincy responded by explaining that the women were not petitioning but simply praying for “the greatest improvement that can possibly be effected in the condition of the human race—the abolition of slavery. ”27 The House exploded in collective anger at his flagrant violation of the ban on reading petitions against slavery and even uttering the word “slavery” in congressional debates. John Quincy smiled wryly, reiterating that he had not read a petition containing the word “slavery” (once more uttering the word) but a prayer of women who, like the members’ own mothers, were offended by “the sinfulness of slavery [again, the forbidden word!] and keenly aggrieved by its existence in a part of our country over which—”

  Choking with anger by then, South Carolina’s Thomas Pinckney interrupted to charge John Quincy with reading a petition. “Point of order!” Pinckney bellowed.

  “—keenly aggrieved by its existence in a part of the country over which Congress possesses exclusive jurisdiction in all cases whatever—”

  “Order! Order!”

  “—do most earnestly petition your honorable body—”

  “Mr. Speaker! I rise on a point order!”

  “—immediately to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia—”

  “Mr. Speaker! A call to order!”

  “Order! Order!”

&nbs
p; “Take your seat!” the Speaker ordered John Quincy.

  “—and,” John Quincy began to sit, accelerating his words as he did, “to-declare-every-human-being-free-who-sets-foot-upon-its-soil.”28

  Increasingly stifled by the Gag Rule and its proponents, John Quincy finally ran out of parliamentary maneuvers and resorted to rhetorical trickery to confuse, embarrass, and essentially emasculate his political enemies. Early in February, he presented two petitions, one from nine unnamed women and the other from actual slaves. As he knew they would, the southerners erupted in collective fury, with one of them resolving that “infamous women . . . [and] slaves do not possess the right of petition secured to the people of the United States by the Constitution.” The same congressman resolved, as well, that any member who presents a petition from slaves should be considered “unfriendly to the Union,” and his third resolution—its content almost comical—cited “the Hon. John Q. Adams” as having “disclaimed all design of doing anything disrespectful to this House.” In effect, it accepted an apology from John Quincy that he had never offered. To prolong the charade, John Quincy asked “for an opportunity for a full hearing in my defense.” He insisted he had never apologized and resented the accusation of having done so. After the laughter subsided, even Gag Rule sponsors relented, recognizing that refusal to hear one of their own colleagues might prevent each of them from defending themselves in the future.

  Focusing on the constitutional right of petition rather than abolition, John Quincy asked, “Will you put the right of petitioning, of craving for help and mercy and protection on the footing of political privileges? . . . No despot of any age or clime has ever denied this humble privilege to the poorest or meanest of human creatures. . . . That would be a sad day, Sir . . . when a vote should pass this House that would not receive a petition from slaves. . . . When the principle is once begun of limiting the right of petition, where would it stop?”

  John Quincy then accused the sponsor of the resolutions of having accused the nine unnamed women of prostitution.

  “I did not say they were prostitutes,” the congressman protested in his southern drawl. “I have not said I know those women!”

  “I am glad to hear the honorable gentleman disclaim any knowledge of them,” John Quincy smirked, “for I had been going to ask, if they were infamous women, who it was that had made them infamous. Not their color, I believe, but their masters! I have heard it said in proof of that fact . . . that in the South there existed great resemblances between the progeny of the colored people and the white men who claim possession of them. Thus, perhaps the charge of infamous might be retorted on those who made it, as reflecting on themselves.”

  As southerners exploded with rage, “Old Man Eloquent,” as the press now called John Quincy, could shout touché. It was a rhetorical triumph like no other in congressional history at the time. Even the Register of Debates saw fit to note the response to John Quincy’s words: “Great agitation in the House.”29

  Although the House voted down resolutions to censure John Quincy, it nonetheless voted to deprive slaves of the right to petition, thus eroding the sanctity of the Constitution and depriving most African Americans of the privileges and protections of the Bill of Rights.

  “Vengeance is mine, say the South!” warned a printed sheet someone slipped under John Quincy’s door. Beneath a drawing of a whip were the words, “Flog and Spare Not!” Another letter addressed him as “Sir” but warned that “your conduct . . . is such as to draw upon you the indignation of the South. . . . The rod is cut that will make your old hide smart for your insidious attempt on southern rights. . . . If ever you dare to vindicate abolition again you will be lynched . . . drawing you from your seat in the House by force. So be on your guard.”30

  Thousands of northerners, however, wrote to support him, calling him the “Sage of Quincy” and urging him to “fear not southern insolence. . . . We will defend and sustain you.”31

  The death threats terrified Louisa, and she, Charles Francis, and Charles Francis’s wife, Abby, pleaded with John Quincy to retreat from his war with what he called the “slaveocracy.” They could do nothing to dissuade him. At sixty-nine, he was on fire, breathing the flames of freedom his father had lit and that he believed he had to maintain. As they approached their fortieth wedding anniversary, it was Louisa, not John Quincy, who turned to poetry and prayer for solace:

  Grant, grant! O God a helping hand

  And save us when we call;

  Protect us ’gainst the murderer’s hand;

  Support us lest we fall.32

  “I walk on the edge of a precipice in every step I take,” John Quincy admitted, but defying age, aching joints, and the deterioration of his body, he found renewed strength in battle. He had never been to war and had always personified the perfect diplomat, but he now seemed fearless, felt fearless—like a knight charging into battle.

  He pursued his daily routine of walking vigorously—defiantly—to and from his house and the Capitol—and swimming the Potomac nude. Occasionally, he misjudged his physical strength and agility and tripped and fell, suffering cuts and bruises and even dislocating his shoulder once—but he never missed a session of Congress. He believed the future of the nation was at stake, and he returned day after day to fight his war against the “slaveocracy.” And Quincy voters sent him back to Congress again and again. Louisa fretted about his health and safety, but she had lost all influence over him and could do nothing to restrain him. He was unstoppable—a meteor spiraling out of control in the political firmament. By 1836, Charles Francis and Abigail had given John Quincy and Louisa a second grandson, Charles Francis Jr., whose presence only added to his grandfather’s determination to defeat injustice in the nation his grandchildren would inherit.

  With each session, his opponents renewed the Gag Rule to try to silence his assault on slavery, but he sidestepped their obstructions and found another target: the admission of slave states into the Union. A fierce advocate of westward expansion when he was President—indeed, he had offered to buy Texas from Mexico—he now led the fight to block Texan appeals to join the Union. With a population of 30,000 American frontiersmen and 5,000 slaves, Texas had always stood apart from the rest of Mexico, and when the Mexican government abolished slavery in all Mexican territory including Texas, Texans declared independence and recruited an army that defeated Mexican forces. They then formed a government that restored slavery and applied for U.S. recognition as a first step toward joining the United States. With Mexico still claiming sovereignty over the territory, U.S. recognition of Texan independence would have meant war—not only with Mexico but with England and France, which had both outlawed slavery and the slave trade and pledged to stand by Mexico in enforcing the ban on slavery.

  John Quincy shot out of his seat to oppose recognition of Texan independence, knowing it was a prelude to annexation and, therefore, an end to the slave-state/free-state balance worked out in the Missouri Compromise. Annexation of Texas, he knew, would give slave states a majority in both houses of Congress and end all hopes for emancipation in the United States.

  In leading the fight against recognition of Texan independence, he also found a perfect weapon against the Gag Rule: “Mr. Chairman,” he thundered. “Are you ready for all these wars? A Mexican war? A war with Britain, if not with France? A general Indian war? A servile war? And, as an inevitable consequence of them all, a civil war?” The South and South-west, he warned, would be “the battlefield upon which the last great conflict must be fought between slavery and emancipation.”

  I avow it as my solemn belief that the annexation of an independent foreign power to this government would be ipso facto a dissolution of this Union. . . . The question is whether a foreign nation [Texas] . . . a nation damned to everlasting fame by the reinstitution of that detested system of slavery, after it had been abolished within its borders, should be admitted into union with a nation of freemen. For, Sir, that name, thank God, is still ours!33


  “Take your seat!” the Speaker ordered, trying to apply the Gag Rule, but John Quincy shouted back, “Am I gagged? Am I gagged?” He then appealed to the House membership, and it overruled the Speaker to ensure open debate on the Texas question—and once they opened the debate on Texas, they automatically reopened the debate on slavery. “The annexation of Texas,” John Quincy thundered in response, “and the proposed war with Mexico are all one and the same thing.”34

  Humiliated by John Quincy’s rhetorical tactics, southerners began to shout, “Expel him!” whenever he spoke. “Expel him!” they repeated, as he continued—sometimes prolonging his diatribes against slavery for hours and, in one instance, for parts of fifteen days.

  John Quincy went beyond the halls of Congress to the American people and became a national presence, a force for justice and progress that he had never been before—even as President of the United States. Invited to speak throughout the Northeast and parts of the West, he used traditional July 4 orations, along with eulogies on the deaths of the Marquis de Lafayette and James Madison, to echo the words of George Washington and other Founding Fathers. Although silent on slavery, all had inveighed against involvement in foreign wars, and John Quincy now connected the two issues. John Quincy appealed to church leaders, calling slavery “a sin before the sight of God,” and they, in turn, formed peace societies that inundated Congress and the White House with petitions signed by tens of thousands of Americans opposed to war with Mexico. State legislatures in Vermont, Michigan, Ohio, and Massachusetts passed resolutions supporting John Quincy’s war against war—and against recognition of Texas. Southerners in Congress, however, proved too strong, and after both houses voted in favor of recognizing Texan independence, President Jackson agreed and appointed a chargé d’affaires. As John Quincy had predicted, a petition for U.S. annexation of Texas followed recognition, but, in the face of the growing antiwar movement, Jackson, nearing the end of his presidency, rejected it, refusing to risk certain war with Mexico.