by Harlow Unger
By then, Andrew Jackson had decided to follow the precedent of earlier Presidents and cede his office after two terms, and the Democratic Party nominated Vice President Van Buren of New York as their candidate to succeed Jackson. Van Buren had used his presidency of the Senate to court antiabolition sentiment in Congress, and in December 1736, he scored an overwhelming victory over three other candidates, including Daniel Webster. John Quincy—by then towering over his House colleagues as champion of national interests—easily won reelection to the House without a party designation and without campaigning. Approaching seventy and feeling the effects of his age, he returned to Congress in 1737 determined to save his nation from destruction.
Having pledged to “tread . . . in the footsteps of President Jackson,” President Van Buren confirmed Jackson’s rejection of Texas’s annexation, thus temporarily setting aside one of the major controversies facing the new Congress but ceding center stage to abolition again. The House immediately reinstituted the Gag Rule, and John Quincy struck back, presenting more than two hundred petitions remonstrating against the Gag Rule as a violation of the Constitution, of the rights of his constituents, “and of my right of freedom of speech as a member of this House.” The House responded with what he described as “war whoops of ‘Order!’”35
Day after day, the struggle continued. During the 1837–1838 session alone, the American Antislavery Society sent the House 130,200 petitions, with untold thousands of names, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; 32,000 petitions to abolish the Gag Rule; 21,200 to forbid slavery in U.S. territories; 22,160 against admitting any new slave states; and 23,160 to abolish the slave trade between states.36 Whenever John Quincy tried to comment on a resolution, the Speaker interrupted: “The gentleman from Massachusetts,” he shouted, “must answer aye or no and nothing else! Order!”
“I refuse to answer,” John Quincy fired back, “because I consider all proceedings of the House—”
Again, the Speaker interrupted him with shouts of “Order! Order!”
John Quincy slumped into his seat in response, but his voice persisted: “—a direct violation of the Constitution!”37
Around him came the cries, “Expel him! Expel him!” from southerners, whose numbers grew ever greater with the expansion of the slave population, which could not vote. Slaves had increased the number of southern members of the House by 35 percent—enough to expel John Quincy, and they now prepared to do just that.
CHAPTER 14
Freedom Is the Prize
Washington’s oppressive summer heat forced Congress to recess before proceeding against John Quincy Adams in 1839, and he was able to return home to the cool breezes of Quincy Bay with Louisa and their two “angelic” granddaughters, the children of their son John II. What should have been a summer of joy, however, proved a season of heartbreak, when the older girl, nine-year-old Fanny, contracted diphtheria. Often shrieking from the pain gripping her throat, she spent weeks in agony before dying in the fall. Her death devastated John Quincy and left him pessimistic about his own future, as he faced expulsion from the House. “I fear I have done little good in the world,” he moaned, “and my life will end in disappointment of the good I would have done had I been permitted.”1
After burying Fanny, the Adamses returned to Washington and brought their surviving granddaughter and her mother to live in their house on F Street. Their presence brought new joy into Louisa’s otherwise drab life and even sparked a smile or two on John Quincy’s often dour face—especially when Mary Louisa turned to her “Grandpappa” for help in algebra and logarithms. He often encouraged her to copy poems—one of them a favorite of his by Scottish poet William Russell, whose “Ode to Fortitude”2 asked, “Can noble things from base proceed?”
“Not so the lion springs,” John Quincy often answered his grandchild, “not so the steed; Nor from the vulgar tenants of the grove, sublimed with pageant-fire, the strong-pounced bird of Jove.”3
In addition to Mary Louisa, the Adamses had grandsons to fuss over. One of them, Charles Francis Adams II, would long remember his grandfather’s continually herding the grandchildren through a canyon of books into his study, and his younger brother Henry Adams would remember his grandfather as “an old man of seventy-five or eighty who was always friendly and gentle, but . . . always called ‘the President,’” while Louisa was “the Madam.”
Author of the renowned autobiography The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams passed summers with his grandparents at Quincy until he was twelve years old and would remember throughout his life “the effect of the back of the President’s head as he sat in his pew on Sundays.”
It was unusual for boys to sit behind a President grandfather and to read over his head the tablet in memory of a President great-grandfather who had pledged “his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor” to secure the independence of his country and so forth. . . . The Irish gardener once said, “You’ll be thinkin’ you’ll be President too.”4
When Congress reconvened in December 1839, elections had divided the House evenly, and disorder attended every effort to establish committee memberships. Deadlocked and facing legislative paralysis, Congress turned to the only man every member trusted, regardless of what they felt about his politics or him personally—and some genuinely hated him. But John Quincy Adams was the man who represented the whole nation, and above all else, they knew him to be that rarest of colleagues: an honest man and patriot. Astonished by the sudden—and almost universal—embrace, John Quincy accepted the invitation and served as Speaker pro tem long enough to work out committee memberships. When he suc-ceeded to everyone’s satisfaction and stepped down from his leadership role, they immediately turned on him again, reimposed the Gag Rule, and overrode his angry demands to repeal it.
John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams’s grandson Henry Adams, seen here as a Harvard undergraduate, had warm memories of his grandparents that he related in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. (NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)
Just then, however, his friend Ellis Gray Loring, a prominent Massachusetts attorney and outspoken opponent of slavery, drew John Quincy’s attention away from the turmoil in Congress with some startling legal documents. In January 1840, a federal district court in New Haven, Connecticut, was about to hear the case of thirty-six Africans who had been prisoners on the slave ship Amistad off the coast of Cuba. Led by a Congolese chief named Cinque, they had broken their chains, killed the captain and three crewmen, and overpowered the white crew. Knowing nothing of navigation, they ordered the white crew to sail them to Africa, and by day the crew complied. At night, however, the crewmen reversed course and eventually sailed into American waters, where an American frigate seized the ship and took it to New London, Connecticut. Officials there arrested the Africans and charged them with piracy and murder, but a number of legal questions complicated the case: Were the Africans property—that is, slaves—to be returned to their owners? Or were they people, to be released on habeas corpus and later tried for piracy and murder? And finally, did the United States have jurisdiction? Or should U.S. authorities release the prisoners to Spanish authorities to do with as they wished under Spanish law?
Killing of the captain of the Amistad by a band of free Africans kidnapped by slavers and transported to Cuba to be sold as slaves. John Quincy Adams pleaded for their freedom before the U.S. Supreme Court. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
The district court pronounced the Negroes to have been free men, whom slavers had kidnapped and transported to Cuba illegally—under Spanish as well as American law. It deemed the killings justified as legitimate acts of self-defense against the kidnappers and ordered the Africans turned over to the President of the United States for transport back to their native land at American government expense.
Having already alienated southerners by rejecting Texas annexation, President Van Buren was unwilling to provoke his southern constituency further and ordered the district attorney to
appeal the lower court order to the circuit court. The circuit court upheld the district court and forced government prosecutors to take the case still higher to the U.S. Supreme Court. By then, however, abolitionists who had paid for the legal defense of the Amistad Africans ran out of funds, and all but two attorneys quit. Only Loring and Roger Sherman Baldwin, grandson of Revolutionary War hero Roger Sherman, agreed to remain on the case pro bono. They turned to John Quincy to join their appeal to the Supreme Court—also without a fee—and he agreed.
“Gracious heavens, my dear Sir,” an outraged Virginian exclaimed in reaction to John Quincy’s embrace of the Africans’ defense. “Your mind is diseased on the subject of slavery. Pray what had you to do with the captured ship? . . . You are great in everything else, but here you show your weakness. Your name will descend to the latest posterity with this blot on it: Mr. Adams loves the Negroes too much, unconstitutionally.”5
Before the case reached the Supreme Court, seventy-three-year-old John Quincy won reelection to the House by a two-to-one majority, while sixty-eight-year-old General William Henry Harrison, hero of the Indian wars, defeated President Martin Van Buren in the presidential election.
“The life I lead,” John Quincy grumbled to his diary as he returned to Washington for double duty in Congress and before the Supreme Court, “is trying to my constitution and cannot be long continued.”
My eyes are threatening to fail me. My hands tremble like an aspen leaf. My memory daily deserts me. My imagination is fallen into the sear and yellow leaf and my judgment sinking into dotage. . . . Should my life and health be spared to perform this service . . . then will be a proper time for me to withdraw and take my last leave of the public service.6
Before the Amistad appeal began, John Quincy received a letter from one of his new African clients, a member of an obscure tribe, the Mendi. He had had no knowledge of English before languishing in Connecticut jails for two years:
“Dear Friend Mr. Adams,” the letter began.
I want to write a letter to you because you love Mendi people and you talk to the Great Court. We want you to ask the court what we have done wrong. What for Americans keep us in prison. Some people say Mendi people crazy dolts because we no talk American language. Americans no talk Mendi. Americans crazy dolts? . . . Dear friend Mr. Adams you have children and friends you love them you feel very sorry if Mendi people come and take all to Africa. . . . All we want is make us free.7
Congolese chief Cinque masterminded the killing of the Amistad captain but knew too little about navigation to prevent the crew from sailing into American waters, where the Africans on board were captured and brought to trial as escaped slaves. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
On February 22, 1841, John Quincy walked from his house to the Supreme Court, which sat in the east wing of the Capitol beneath the Senate floor. It was George Washington’s birthday—the Founding Father whom John Quincy most revered after his own father and who had launched John Quincy’s career in public service. Uncompromising southern slaveholders made up the majority of the nine judges, and John Quincy knew them all. In the minority were Joseph Story of Massachusetts, a former Harvard law professor, and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a Maryland slaveholder who would later free his slaves. After the prosecution demanded that the government return the Amistad Negroes to the Spanish minister for restoration to their “owners,” Roger Baldwin argued for the defense: “The American people,” he declared, “have never imposed it as a duty upon the government of the United States to become actors in an attempt to reduce to slavery men found in a state of freedom by giving extraterritorial force to a foreign slave law.” The prosecuting attorney replied that slaves “released from slavery by acts of aggression” do not lose their status as the property of their rightful owners “any more than a slave becomes free in Pennsylvania who forcibly escapes from Virginia.”8
The next day, February 24, John Quincy rose to address the court. “The courtroom was full, but not crowded,” he noted, “and there were not many ladies. I had been deeply distressed and agitated till the moment when I rose, and then my spirit did not sink within me. With grateful heart for aid from above . . . I spoke four hours and a half, with sufficient method and order to witness little flagging of attention by the judges.”9
“Justice,” he began, “as defined in the Institutes of Justinian nearly 2,000 years ago . . . is the constant and perpetual will to secure every one his own right.”
I appear here on behalf of thirty-six individuals, the life and liberty of every one of whom depend on the decision of this court. . . . Thirty-two or three have been charged with the crime of murder. Three or four of them are female children, incapable, in the judgment of our laws, of the crime of murder or piracy or, perhaps, of any other crime. . . . Yet they have all been held as close prisoners now for the period of eighteen long months. 10
John Quincy told the justices of his distress in prosecuting the government of his own nation before the nation’s highest court and, indeed, “before the civilized world.” But, he said, it was his duty. “I must do it.”
The government is still in power. . . . The lives and liberties of all my clients are in its hands. . . . The charge I make against the present executive administration is that in all their proceedings relating to these unfortunates, instead of that justice which they were bound not less than this honorable court itself to observe, they have substituted sympathy!—sympathy with one of the parties in this conflict and antipathy to the other. Sympathy with the white; antipathy to the black—and in proof of this charge, I adduce the admission and avowal of the secretary of state himself.11
John Quincy went on to read the letter from Secretary of State John Forsyth of Georgia to the Spanish minister in America, citing the owners of the Amistad as “the only parties aggrieved”—that all the right was on their side and all the wrong on the side of their surviving, self-emancipated victims.
“I ask your honors, was this justice?”12
Far from any “flagging of attention,” the judges sat transfixed for more than four hours—until other needs forced them to adjourn until the next day. That night, however, one of the justices died, and Chief Justice Taney postponed resumption of John Quincy’s argument for a week.
The court reconvened on March 1, with John Quincy summarizing his previous argument, then standing for three more hours, reiterating the argument that the Amistad Negroes had been free men, seized against their will on their native soil, abducted onto a ship, where they defended themselves and, in doing so, killed their kidnappers. “What . . . would have been the tenure by which every human being in this Union, man, woman, and child, would have held the blessing of personal freedom? Would it not have been by the tenure of executive discretion, caprice, or tyranny . . . at the discretion of a foreign minister, would it not have disabled forever the effective power of habeas corpus?”
Then he came to the end of his presentation. Eschewing secular, legalistic appeals, “Old Man Eloquent” reached into his rhetorical reservoir for spiritual principles he believed he shared with every decent human being. In a moment that ensured his standing in the history of Congress and the Supreme Court, John Quincy Adams told the court that “more than thirty-seven years past, my name was entered and yet stands recorded on both the rolls as one of the attorneys and counselors of this court.”
I appear again to plead the cause of justice, and now of liberty and life, in behalf of many of my fellow men. . . . I stand before the same court, but not before the same judges. . . . As I cast my eyes along those seats of honor and of public trust, now occupied by you, they seek in vain for one of those honored and honorable persons whose indulgence listened then to my voice.13
After a dramatic pause, John Quincy turned his eyes toward the heavens, calling out the hallowed names of the court’s early justices—John Marshall, Bushrod Washington, and Thomas Todd of Virginia, William Cushing of Massachusetts and Samuel Chase of Maryland, William Johnson of South Carolina, and Henry
Livingston of New York. “Where are they?” he cried out, turning to focus on the faces of each of the justices. “Where?” he paused before lowering his voice to a near whisper.
Gone! Gone! All Gone! Gone from the services which . . . they faithfully rendered to their country. . . . I humbly hope, and fondly trust, that they have gone to receive the rewards of blessedness on high. In taking leave of this bar and of this honorable court, I can only . . . petition heaven that every member of it may . . . after a long and illustrious career in this world, be received at the portals of the next with the approving sentence, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of the Lord.”14
As tears flowed down spectators’ faces, the prosecuting attorney shook his head in disbelief. He had no idea what John Quincy’s closing had to do with the facts of the case, but members of the court understood that by recalling the names of the legendary justices who had helped establish the nation’s federal judiciary and, indeed, the nation itself, John Quincy was asking them to abide by standards higher than man’s law. Accordingly, the court voted unanimously to give its senior member, Joseph Story, the honor of reading their monumental decision on March 9:
“There does not seem to us to be any ground for doubt that these Negroes ought to be free.”15
“Glorious!” Roger Sherman Baldwin congratulated John Quincy. “Glorious not only as a triumph of humanity and justice, but as a vindication of our national character from reproach and dishonor.”16
