CHAPTER XIII.

REPORT ON PRESIDENT TYLER'S APPROVAL, WITH OBJECTIONS, OF THE BILL FOR

THE APPORTIONMENT OF REPRESENTATIVES.--REPORT ON HIS VETO OF THE BILL

TO PROVIDE A REVENUE FROM IMPORTS.--LECTURE ON THE SOCIAL COMPACT, AND

THE THEORIES OF FILMER, HOBBES, SYDNEY, AND LOCKE.--ADDRESS TO HIS

CONSTITUENTS ON THE POLICY OF PRESIDENT TYLER'S ADMINISTRATION.--ADDRESS

TO THE NORFOLK COUNTY TEMPERANCE SOCIETY.--DISCOURSE ON THE NEW ENGLAND

CONFEDERACY OF 1643.--LETTER TO THE CITIZENS OF BANGOR ON WEST INDIA

EMANCIPATION.--ORATION ON LAYING THE CORNER-STONE OF THE CINCINNATI

OBSERVATORY.

On the 23d of June, 1842, President Tyler announced to the House of

Representatives that he had signed and approved an act for the

apportionment of representatives among the several states, and had

deposited the same in the office of the Secretary of State, accompanied

with his reasons for giving to it his sanction; by which it appeared

that, after having officially "approved" that act, he had declared, in

effect, that _he did not approve of it_, having doubts concerning

both its constitutionality and expediency, and that he had signed it

only in deference to the opinions of both houses of Congress. Mr. Adams,

from the committee to whom these proceedings of the President had been

referred, in a report to the House severely scrutinizes the course of

the President in this respect. He declares that the duty of the

President, in exercising the authority given him by the constitution to

sign and approve acts of Congress, is prescribed in terms equally

concise and precise; and that it has given him no power to alter, amend,

comment upon, or assign his reasons for the performance of his duty.

These views he illustrates by a minute examination of the language of

that instrument, and shows that what the President had done was a

departure not only from the language but from the substance of the law

prescribing to him his duties in that respect. Mr. Adams then, in behalf

of the committee, after showing that the proceeding of the President in

this instance is without precedent or example, and imminently dangerous

in its tendencies, proceeds to remark:

"The entry upon the bill is, 'Approved: John Tyler;' and that entry

makes it the law of the land; and then, by a private note deposited

with the law in the Department of State, the same hand which, under

the sacred obligation of an official oath, has written the word

'_approved_,' and added the sign-manual of his name, feels it due

to himself to declare that the bill is not approved, and that he

doubts both its constitutionality and its policy, and that he signs

it only in deference to the declared _will_ of both houses of

Congress; not from assent to their reasons, but in submission to

their _will_.

"And he feels it due to himself to say this,--first, that his

motives for signing it may be rightly understood; secondly, that his

opinions may not be liable to be misunderstood, or, thirdly, quoted

hereafter erroneously as a precedent. The motives of a President of

the United States for signing an act of Congress can be no other

than because he approves it; and because, in that event, the

constitution enjoins it upon him to sign it as a duty, which he has

sworn to perform, and with which he cannot dispense.

"But no; in the present case the President feels it due to himself

to say that his motives for signing the bill were not because he

approved it, or because it was made by the constitution his duty to

sign it, but to prove his submission to the will of Congress. He

feels it due also to himself to guard against the liability of his

opinions to misconstruction, or to be quoted hereafter erroneously

as a precedent. His signature to the bill, preceded by the word

'_approved_,' taken in connection with the duties prescribed to the

President of the United States by the constitution, certainly was

liable to the construction that his opinions were favorable to the

bill. They were, indeed, liable to no other construction respectful

to him, or trustful to his honor and sincerity; nor can there be a

doubt that they would have been quoted hereafter as a precedent. No

man living could have imagined that the word '_approved_' could be

construed to mean either doubt or obsequious submission to the will

of others; and it is with extreme regret that the committee see, in

the President's exposition of his reasons for signing an act of

Congress, the open avowal that, in his vocabulary, used in the

performance of one of the most solemn and sacred of his duties, the

word '_approved_' means not approval, but doubt; not the expression

of his own opinions, but mere obsequiousness to the will of

Congress."

The report proceeds to deny that the example of the advice given by the

first Secretary of State to the first President of the United States,

which the President adduces in his support, and the following that

advice by that President, gave any "sanction to such recorded

duplicity." It asserts that such an example is of dangerous tendency--an

encroachment by the Executive on legislative functions; that the reasons

given by President Tyler are a running commentary against the law,

against its execution according to the intention of the legislature, and

forestalling the appropriate action of the judicial tribunals in

expounding it. These and consentaneous views the report largely

illustrates, and concludes with a resolution declaring the proceedings

of the President in this case to have been unwarranted by the

constitution and laws of the United States, injurious to the public

interest, and of evil example in future; solemnly protesting against its

ever being repeated, or adduced as a precedent hereafter.

On the 9th of August, 1842, President Tyler returned to the House of

Representatives the bill to provide a revenue from imports, and changing

the existing laws imposing duties on them, accompanied with his

objections to it. The house referred the subject to a select committee,

of which Mr. Adams was chairman. On the 16th of August he reported that

the message was the last of a series of executive measures, the result

of which had been to defeat and nullify the whole action of the

legislative authority of the Union upon the most important interests of

the nation;--that, at the accession of the late President Harrison, the

revenue and the credit of the country were so completely disordered,

that a suffering people had commanded a change in the administration;

and the elections throughout the Union had placed in both houses of

Congress majorities, the natural exponents of the principles which it

was the will of the people should be substituted instead of those which

had brought the country to a condition of such wretchedness and

shame;--that there was a perfect harmony between the chosen President of

the people and this majority; but that, by an inscrutable decree of

Providence, the chief of the people's choice, in harmony with whose

principles the majorities of both houses had been constituted, was laid

low in death. A successor to the office had assumed the title, with

totally different principles, who, though professing to harmonize with

the principles of his immediate predecessor, and with the majorities in

both houses of Congress, soon disclosed his diametrical opposition to

them.

The report then proceeds to show the several developments of this new

and most unfortunate condition of the general government, effected by "a

system of continual and unrelenting exercise of executive legislation,"--by

the alternate gross abuse of constitutional power, and bold assumption

of powers never vested in him by any law,--resulting in four several

vetoes, which, in the course of fifteen months, had suspended the

legislation of the Union. It then states and comments upon the reasons

assigned by the President for returning this bill to the House of

Representatives, with his objections to it, as specified in the veto

message referred to this committee; and, after a rigid analysis and

course of argument, pronounces them "feeble, inconsistent, and

unsatisfactory;" after which the report proceeds:

"They perceive that the whole legislative power of the Union has

been, for the last fifteen months, with regard to the action of

Congress upon measures of vital importance, in a state of suspended

animation, strangled by the _five_ times repeated stricture of

the executive cord. They observe that, under these unexampled

obstructions to the exercise of their high and legitimate duties,

they have hitherto preserved the most respectful forbearance towards

the Executive Chief; that while he has time after time annulled, by

the mere act of his will, their commission from the people to enact

laws for the common welfare, they have forborne even the expression

of their resentment for these multiplied insults and injuries. They

believed they had a high destiny to fulfil, by administering to the

people, in the form of law, remedies for the sufferings which they

had too long endured. The will of one man has frustrated all their

labors, and prostrated all their powers. The majority of the

committee believe that the case has occurred, in the annals of our

Union, contemplated by the founders of the constitution, by the

grant to the House of Representatives of the power to impeach the

President of the United States; but they are aware that the resort

to that expedient might, in the present condition of public affairs,

prove abortive. They see the irreconcilable difference of opinion

and of action between the legislative and executive departments of

the government is but sympathetic with the same discordant views and

feelings among the people. To them alone the final issue of the

struggle must be left. In sorrow and mortification, under the

failure of all their labors to redeem the honor and prosperity of

their country, it is a cheering consolation to them that the

termination of their own official existence is at hand; that they

are even now about to return to receive the sentence of their

constituents upon themselves; that the legislative power of the

Union, crippled and disabled as it may now be, is about to pass,

renovated and revivified by the will of the people, into other

hands, upon whom will devolve the task of providing that remedy for

the public distempers which their own honest and agonizing energies

have in vain endeavored to supply.

"The power of the present Congress to enact laws essential to the

welfare of the people has been struck with apoplexy by the executive

hand. Submission to his will is the only condition upon which he

will permit them to act. For the enactment of a measure, earnestly

recommended by himself, he forbids their action, unless coupled with

a condition declared by himself to be on a subject so totally

different that he will not suffer them to be coupled in the same

law. With that condition Congress cannot comply. In this state of

things he has assumed, as the committee fully believe, the exercise

of the whole legislative power to himself, and is levying millions

of money upon the people, without any authority of law. But the

final decision of this question depends neither upon legislative nor

executive, but upon judicial authority; nor can the final decision

of the Supreme Court upon it be pronounced before the close of the

present Congress. In the mean time, the abusive exercise of the

constitutional power of the President to arrest the action of

Congress upon measures vital to the welfare of the people has

wrought conviction upon the minds of a majority of the committee

that the veto power itself must be restrained and modified by an

amendment of the constitution itself; a resolution for which they

accordingly herewith respectfully report."

The report was signed by ten members of the committee, including the

chairman. The resolution with which it closed provided for submitting to

the States a proposed modification of the constitution, by substituting

the words "majority of the whole number," instead of the words "two

thirds," by which the power of the House of Representatives to pass a

law, notwithstanding the veto of the President, is at present

restricted.

The report was agreed to in the house by a majority of one hundred ayes

to ninety nays, and the resolution itself passed by a majority of

ninety-eight ayes to ninety nays; but the constitution, in such cases,

requiring two thirds majority, it was of consequence rejected.

In November, 1842, Mr. Adams delivered a lecture before the Franklin

Lyceum, at Providence, Rhode Island, on the Social Compact, in which he

enters into "an examination of the principles of democracy, aristocracy,

and universal suffrage, as exemplified in a historical review of the

present constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with some

notice of the origin of human government, and remarks on the theories of

divine right, as maintained by Hobbes and Sir Robert Filmer, on one

side, and by Sydney, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, on the other."

He shows, from the history of Massachusetts, that the fundamental

principle asserted in the fifth article of our declaration of rights,

that all power resides originally in _the people_, is derived from the

above-named writers, and explains how this power has been practically

exercised by the people of that state. The assertion of Rousseau, that

the social compact can be formed only by unanimous consent, because the

rule itself that a majority of votes shall prevail can only be

established by agreement, that is, by compact, Mr. Adams controverts,

maintaining in opposition to it that the social compact constituting

the body-politic is, and by the law of nature must be, a compact not

merely of individuals, but of families. On this view of the subject he

largely animadverts. The philosophical examination of the foundations

of civil society, of human governments, and of the rights and duties of

man, he views as among the consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

The question raised by Martin Luther involved the whole theory of _the

rights_ of individual man, paramount to all human authority. The

talisman of _human rights_ dissolved the spell of political as well as

of ecclesiastical power. The Calvinists of Geneva and the Puritans of

England contested the right of kings to prescribe articles of faith to

their people, and this question necessarily drew after it the general

question of the origin of all human government. In search of its

principle, Hobbes, a royalist, affirmed that the state of nature

between man and man was a state of war, whence it followed that

government originated in _conquest_. This theory is directly opposite

to that of Jesus Christ. It cuts the gordian knot with the sword,

extinguishes all the rights of man, and makes fear the corner-stone of

government. It is the only theory upon which slavery can be justified,

as conformable to the law of nature. This is Sir John Falstaff's law,

when, speaking of Justice Shallow, he says, "If the young dace be a

bait for the old pike, I see no reason in _the law of nature_ why I may

not snap at _him_." Sir Robert Filmer, by a theory far more plausible,

though not more sound, than that of Hobbes, derived the origin of human

government from the Scriptures of the Old Testament, from the grant of

the earth to Adam, and afterwards to Noah.

But the vital error of Filmer was in assuming that the natural

authority of the father over the child was either permanent or

unlimited; and still more that the authority of the husband over the

wife was unlimited. Sir Robert Filmer did not perceive that by the laws

of nature and of God every individual human being is born with rights

which no other individual, or combination of individuals, can take

away; that all exercise of human authority must be under the limitation

of right and wrong; and that all despotic power over human beings is

exercised in _defiance_ of the laws of nature and of God--all, Sir John

Falstaff's law of nature between the young dace and the old pike.

The history of Filmer's work was remarkable. It was composed and

published in the heat of the struggle between King Charles the First

and the Commons of England, which terminated in the overthrow of the

monarchy, and in the death of King Charles upon the scaffold. It was

the theory of government on which _the cause_ of the house of Stuart

was sustained. No man can be surprised that such a cause was swept away

by a moral and political whirlwind; that it carried with it all the

institutions of civil society, so that its march was a wild desolation.

James, by relying on the principles of Filmer's theory, fell back into

the arms of the Church of Rome, and vainly struggled to turn back the

tide of religious reformation, and revive the divine right of kings,

and passive obedience, and non-resistance. The republican spirit had

slumbered on the white cliffs of Albion, and in his sleep, like the

man-mountain in Lilliput, had been pinned down to the earth by the

threads of a spider's web for cords. On the first reäppearance of

Filmer's book, he awoke, and, like the strong man in Israel, at the

cost of his own life, shook down the temple of Dagon, and buried

himself and the Philistines again under its ruins.

The discourses of John Locke concerning government demolished while

they immortalized the work of Filmer, whose name and book are now

remembered only to be detested. But the first principles of morals and

politics, which have long been settled, acquire the authority of

self-evident truths, which, when first discussed, may have been

vehemently and portentously contested. John Locke, a kindred soul to

Algernon Sydney, seven years after his death published an elaborate

system of government, in which he declares the "false principles and

foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers are detected and

overthrown." Subsequently, he published an essay concerning the true

original extent and end of civil government. "The principles," says Mr.

Adams, "of Sydney and Locke constitute the foundation of the North

American Declaration of Independence; and, together with the subsequent

writings of Montesquieu and Rousseau, that of the constitution of the

Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and of the constitution of the United

States." Neither of these constitutions separately, nor the two in

combined harmony, can, without a gross and fraudulent perversion of

language, be termed a _Democracy_. They are neither democracy,

aristocracy, nor monarchy. They form together a mixed government,

compounded not only of the three elements of democracy, aristocracy,

and monarchy, but with a fourth added element, _Confederacy_. The

constitution of the United States when adopted was so far from being

considered as a democracy, that Patrick Henry charged it, in the

Virginia Convention, with an awful squinting towards monarchy. The

tenth number of the Federalist, written by James Madison, is an

elaborate and unanswerable essay upon the vital and radical difference

between a democracy and a republic. But it is impossible to disconnect

the relation between names and things. When the anti-federal party

dropped the name of Republicans to assume that of _Democrats_, their

principles underwent a corresponding metamorphosis; and they are now

the most devoted and most obsequious champions of executive power--the

very life-guard of the commander of the armies and navies of this

Union. The name of Democracy was assumed because it was discovered to

be _very taking_ among the multitude; yet, after all, it is but the

investment of the _multitude_ with absolute power. The constitutions of

the United States and of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are both the

work of the people--one of the Union, the other of the State--not of

the whole people by the phantom of universal suffrage, but of the whole

people by that portion of them capable of contracting for the whole.

They are not democracy, nor aristocracy, nor monarchy, but a compound

of them all, of which democracy is the oxygen, or vital air, too pure

in itself for human respiration, but which in the union of other

elements, equally destructive in themselves and less pure, forms that

moral and political atmosphere in which we live, and move, and have our

being.

The preceding abstract, given almost wholly in the language of Mr.

Adams, shows the general drift of this characteristic essay.

On the 17th of September, 1842, a convention of delegates from the

district he represented received Mr. Adams at Braintree, and expressed

their thanks for his services on the floor of Congress, especially for

his fidelity in their defence "against every attempt of Southern

representatives and their Northern allies to sacrifice at the altar of

slavery the freedom of speech and the press, the right of petition, the

protection of free labor, and the immunities and privileges of Northern

citizens." Mr. Adams, in reply, after expressing his sensibility at

their unabated confidence in the integrity of his intentions, and in his

capacity to serve them, declared that it had been his endeavor to

discharge all the duties of his station "faithfully and gratefully to

them; faithfully to our native and beloved Commonwealth; faithfully to

our whole common country, the North American Union; faithfully to the

world of mankind, in every quarter of the globe, and under every variety

of condition or complexion; faithfully to that creator, God, who rules

the world in justice and mercy, and to whom our final account must be

made up by the standard of those attributes." He then proceeded to

state, that on receiving their invitation to attend that meeting, it had

been his intention to avail himself of the opportunity to unfold to them

the professions, principles, and practices, of the federal

administration of these United States, under the successive Presidents

invested with executive power, from the day when he took his seat as

their representative in Congress to the then present hour.

"I trusted it would be in my power to present to your contemplation,

not only the outward and ostensible indications of federal policy,

proclaimed and trumpeted abroad as the maxims of the Jackson, Van

Buren, and Tyler administrations, but to lay bare their secret

purposes, and never yet divulged designs for the future government

or dissolution of this Union.

"Further reflection convinced me that this exposition would require

more time than you could possibly devote to one meeting to hear me.

My friend and colleague, Mr. Appleton, has, in an answer to an

invitation of his constituents to a public dinner, lifted a corner

of the veil, and opened a glance at the monstrous and horrible

object beneath it; but South Carolina nullification itself, with its

appendages of separation, secession, and the forty-bale theory, was

but the struggles of Quixotism dreaming itself Genius, to erect on

the basis of state sovereignty a system for seating South Carolina

slavery on the throne of this Union in the event of success; or of

severing the present Union, and instituting, with a tier of embryo

Southern States to be wrested from the dismemberment of Mexico, a

Southern slaveholding confederation to balance the free Republic of

the North.

"'The passage,' says Mr. Appleton, 'of the revenue bill imposing

discriminating duties with a view to the protection and

encouragement of American industry, is, under the circumstances, an

event of the very highest importance. Notwithstanding the system had

been formerly established in 1816, and fortified by succeeding

legislation; notwithstanding its success in the development of our

resources and the establishment of manufactures and arts, surpassing

the expectation of the most sanguine; notwithstanding the immense

investments of capital made on the faith of the national legislation

inviting such application, the attempt was seriously entertained of

breaking down this whole system, with a reckless disregard of

consequences, either in the wanton destruction of capital, or, what

is far more important, in the general paralysis of the industry of

the country. _The origin of this attempt may be traced to the mad

ambition of certain politicians of South Carolina, who, in 1832,

formed the project of a Southern Confederacy, severed from the rest

of the Union, with that state for its centre, as affording more

security to the slave states for their peculiar institutions than

exist under the general government._

"'This project led to the invention of a theory of political

economy, which was maintained with an ingenuity and perseverance

worthy of a better cause, founded on the assumption that all imports

are, in effect, direct taxes upon exports. So indefatigable were the

promulgators of this theory, that the whole South was made to

believe that a protective tariff was a system of plunder levied upon

their productions of cotton, rice, and tobacco, which constituted

the bulk of our exports to foreign markets.'"

Mr. Adams then proceeds to state that the principles of nullification

were never more inflexibly maintained, never more inexorably pursued,

than they had been by all that portion of the South which had given

them countenance, from the day of the death of William Henry Harrison

to the present, and that nullification is the creed of the executive

mansion at Washington, the acting President's _conscience_, and the

woof of all his vetoes.

"Nullification," he adds, "portentous and fatal as it is to the

prospects and welfare of this Union, is not the only instrument of

Southern domination wielded by the executive arm at Washington. The

dismemberment of our neighboring republic of Mexico, and the acquisition

of an immense portion of her territories, was a gigantic and darling

project of Andrew Jackson, and is another instrument wielded for the

same purpose.

"Within five weeks after the proclamation of the constitution of the

Republic of Texas followed the battle of San Jacinto; and from that

day the struggles of the Southern politicians, who ruled the

councils of this nation, were for upwards of two years unremitting,

and unrestrained by any principles of honor, honesty, and truth:

openly avowed, and audaciously proclaimed, whenever they dared;

clandestinely pursued, under delusive masks and false colors,

whenever the occasion required.

"No sooner was the event of the battle of San Jacinto known than

memorials and resolutions, from various parts of the Union, were

poured in upon Congress, calling upon that body for the immediate

recognition of the independence of the Republic of Texas. Many of

these memorials and resolutions came from the free states, and one

of them from the Legislature of Connecticut, then blindly devoted to

the rank Southern, sectional policy of the Jackson administration,

by that infatuation of Northern sympathy with Southern interests,

which Mr. Appleton points out to our notice, and the true purposes

of which had already been sufficiently divulged in an address of Mr.

Clement C. Clay to the Legislature of Alabama. But there was another

more hidden impulse to this extreme solicitude for the recognition

of the independence of Texas working in the free states, quite as

ready to assume the mask and cap of liberty as the slave-dealing

champions of the rights of man. The Texan land and liberty jobbers

had spread the contagion of their land-jobbing traffic all over the

free states throughout the Union. Land-jobbing, stock-jobbing,

slave-jobbing, rights-of-man-jobbing, were all, hand in hand,

sweeping over the land like a hurricane. The banks were plunging

into desperate debts, preparing for a universal suspension of specie

payment, under the shelter of legislative protection to flood the

country with irredeemable paper. Gambling speculation was the

madness of the day; and, in the wide-spread ruin which we are now

witnessing as the last stage of this moral pestilence, Texan bonds

and Texan lands form no small portion of the fragments from the

wreck of money corporations contributing their assets of two or

three cents to the dollar. All these interests furnished vociferous

declaimers for the recognition of Texan independence."

Mr. Adams next states the proceedings of Congress on this subject during

the whole of the residue of the Jackson administration, terminating with

the recognition by Congress of the independence of Texas. At this period

Mr. Van Buren--a Northern man with Southern principles--assumed the

functions of President of the United States. But the recognition of the

independence of Texas availed nothing without her annexation to the

United States. In October, 1837, a formal proposition from the Republic

of Texas for such annexation was communicated to Congress, with the

statement that it had been declined by Mr. Van Buren. But the passion

for the annexation of Texas was not to be so disconcerted. Memorials for

and against its annexation poured into Congress, and were referred to

the Committee on Foreign Affairs. "In the debate which arose from their

report," says Mr. Adams, "I exposed the whole system of duplicity and

perfidy towards Mexico, which had marked the Jackson administration from

its commencement to its close. It silenced the clamors for the

annexation of Texas to this Union for three years, till the catastrophe

of the Van Buren administration. The people of the free states were

lulled into the belief that the whole project was abandoned, and that

they should hear no more of the slave-trade cravings for the annexation

of Texas. Had Harrison lived, they would have heard no more of it to

this day. But no sooner was John Tyler installed into the President's

house than nullification, and Texas, and war with Mexico, rose again

upon the surface, with eye steadily fixed upon the polar star of

Southern slave-dealing supremacy in the government of the Union."

Mr. Adams then comments upon the history of the Santa Fé expedition,

which was fitted out in the summer of 1841, shortly after the accession

of Mr. Tyler, by the then President of Texas, having been originated and

concerted within these states, and carried on chiefly by citizens of the

United States. That it was known, countenanced, and encouraged, at the

presidential house, was, said Mr. Adams, more than questioned; for,

while it was on foot, and before it was known, frequent hints were given

in public journals, moved by Executive impulse, that at the coming

session the annexation of Texas was to be introduced by a citizen of the

highest distinction. "But the Texan expedition was ill-starred. Instead

of taking and rioting upon the beauty and booty of Santa Fé, they were

all captured themselves, without even the glory of putting a price on

their lives. They surrendered without firing a gun." The failure of this

expedition discomfited the war faction in Congress, and injured for a

moment, and only for a moment, the project to which Southern

nullification clung with the grasp of death.

Mr. Adams next proceeds to exhibit the evidence to show "the

participation of the administration at Washington with this incursion of

banditti from Texas against Santa Fé," and to explain "the legislative

exploit" by which the treasury of the United States was made to

contribute to "the dismemberment of Mexico, and the annexation of an

immense portion of its territory to the slave representation of the

Union." The internal evidence he regarded as irresistible that "the

expedition against Santa Fé was planned within your boundaries, and

committed to the execution of your citizens, under the shelter of

Mexican banners and commissions."

In the subsequent portion of this address Mr. Adams, regarding the

principles of nullification as being at the basis of Mr. Tyler's whole

policy, enters at large into its nature, and thus speaks of its origin

and association with democracy:

"Let me advert again to the important disclosure in the letter of

Mr. Appleton to his constituents, from which I have taken the

liberty of reading to you an extract. Nullification was generated

in the hot-bed of slavery. It drew its first breath in the land

where the meaning of the word democracy is that a majority of the

people are the goods and chattels of the minority; that more than

one half of the people are not men, women, and children, but

things, to be treated by their owners, not exactly like dogs and

horses, but like tables, chairs, and joint-stools; that they are

not even fixtures to the soil, as in countries where servitude is

divested of its most hideous features,--not even beings in the

mitigated degradation from humanity of beasts, or birds, or

creeping things,--but destitute not only of the sensibilities of

our own race of men, but of the sensations of all animated nature.

That is the native land of nullification, and it is a theory of

constitutional law worthy of its origin. _Democracy_, pure

democracy, has at least its foundation in a generous theory of

human rights. It is founded on the natural equality of mankind. It

is the corner-stone of the Christian religion. It is the first

_element_ of _all_ lawful government upon earth. Democracy is

self-government of the community by the conjoint will of the

majority of numbers. What communion, what affinity, can there be

between that principle and nullification, which is the despotism of

a corporation--unlimited, unrestrained, _sovereign_ power? Never,

never was amalgamation so preposterous and absurd as that of

nullification and democracy."

Of the hostility of nullification to the prosperity of the free states

he thus speaks:

"The root of the doctrine of nullification is that if the internal

improvement of the country should be left to the legislative

management of the national government, and the proceeds of the

sales of the public lands should be applied as a perpetual and

self-accumulating fund for that purpose, the blessings unceasingly

showered upon the people by this process would so grapple the

affections of the people to the national authority, that it would,

in process of time, overshadow that of the state governments, and

settle the preponderancy of power in the free states; and then the

undying worm of conscience twinges with terror for the fate of _the

peculiar institution_. Slavery stands aghast at the prospective

promotion of the general welfare, and flies to nullification for

defence against the energies of freedom, and the inalienable rights

of man."

After stating and commenting upon the policy of General Jackson, as

having for its object the "dismembering of Mexico, and restoring slavery

to Texas, and of surrounding the South with a girdle of slave states, to

eternize the blessings of the peculiar institution, and spread them like

a garment of praise over the whole North American Union," he explained

the effect of party divisions always operating in the United States, and

the character of the several proportions of their power. Their results,

in tending to revive and strengthen slavery and the slave-trade, which

Mr. Adams then foretold, excited melancholy anticipations in the mind of

every reflecting freeman. What was then prophecy is now history.

"There are two different party divisions always operating in the

House of Representatives of the United States,--one sectional,

North and South, or, in other words, slave and free; the other

political--both sides of which have been known at different times

by different names, but are now usually denominated Whigs and

Democrats. The Southern or slave party, outnumbered by the free,

are cemented together by a common, intense interest of property to

the amount of twelve hundred millions of dollars in human beings,

the very existence of which is neither allowed nor tolerated in the

North. It is the opinion of many theoretical reasoners on the

subject of government that, whatever may be its form, the ruling

power of every nation is its property. Mr. Van Buren, in one of his

messages to Congress, gravely pointed out to them the

anti-republican tendencies of associated wealth. Reflect now upon

the tendencies of twelve hundred millions of dollars of associated

wealth, directly represented in your national legislature by one

hundred members, together with one hundred and forty members

representing persons only--freemen, not chattels. Reflect, also,

that this twelve hundred millions of dollars of property is

peculiar in its character, and comes under a classification once

denominated by a Governor of Virginia _property acquired by crime_;

that it sits uneasy upon the conscience of its owner; that, in the

purification of human virtue, and the progress of the Christian

religion, it has become, and is daily becoming, more and more

odious; that Washington and Jefferson, themselves slaveholders,

living and dying, bore testimony against it; that it was the dying

REMORSE of John Randolph; that it is renounced and abjured by the

supreme pontiff of the Roman Church, abolished with execration by

the Mahometan despot of Tunis, shaken to its foundations by the

imperial autocrat of all the Russias and the absolute monarch of

Austria;--all, all bearing reluctant and extorted testimony to the

self-evident truth that, by the laws of nature and nature's God,

man cannot be the property of man. Recollect that the first cry of

human feeling against this unhallowed outrage upon human rights

came from ourselves--from the Quakers of Pennsylvania; that it

passed from us to England, from England to France, and spread over

the civilized world; that, after struggling for nearly a century

against the most sordid interests and most furious passions of man,

it made its way at length into the Parliament, and ascended the

throne, of the British Isles. The slave-trade was made piracy first

by the Congress of the United States, and then by the Parliament of

Great Britain.

"But the curse fastened by the progress of Christian charity and of

human rights upon the African slave-trade could not rest there. If

the African slave-trade was piracy, the coasting American

slave-trade could not be innocent, nor could its aggravated

turpitude be denied. In the sight of the same God who abhors the

iniquity of the African slave-trade, neither the American

slave-trade nor slavery itself can be held guiltless. From the

suppression of the African slave-trade, therefore, the British

Parliament, impelled by the irresistible influence of the British

people, proceeded to point the battery of its power against slavery

itself. At the expense of one hundred millions of dollars, it

abolished slavery, and emancipated all the slaves in the British

transatlantic colonies; and the government entered upon a system of

negotiation with all the powers of the world for the ultimate

extinction of slavery throughout the globe.

"The utter and unqualified inconsistency of slavery, in any of its

forms, with the principles of the North American Revolution, and the

Declaration of our Independence, had so forcibly struck the Southern

champions of our rights, that the abolition of slavery and the

emancipation of slaves was a darling project of Thomas Jefferson

from his first entrance into public life to the last years of his

existence. But the associated wealth of the slaveholders outweighed

the principles of the Revolution, and by the constitution of the

United States a compromise was established between slavery and

freedom. The extent of the sacrifice of principle made by the North

in this compromise can be estimated only by its practical effects.

The principle is that the House of Representatives of the United

States is a representation only of the persons and freedom of the

North, and of the persons, property, and slavery, of the South. Its

practical operation has been to give the balance of power in the

house, and in every department of the government, into the hands of

the minority of numbers. For practical results look to the present

composition of your government in all its departments. The President

of the United States, the President of the Senate, the Speaker of

the House, are all slaveholders. The Chief Justice and four out of

the nine Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States are

slaveholders. The commander-in-chief of your army and the general

next in command are slaveholders. A vast majority of all the

officers of your navy, from the highest to the lowest, are

slaveholders. Of six heads of the executive departments, three are

slaveholders; securing thus, with the President, a majority in all

cabinet consultations and executive councils. From the commencement

of this century, upwards of forty years, the office of Chief Justice

has always been held by slaveholders; and when, upon the death of

Judge Marshall, the two senior justices upon the bench were citizens

of the free states, and unsurpassed in eminence of reputation both

for learning in the law and for spotless integrity, they were both

overlooked and overslaughed by a slaveholder, far inferior to either

of them in reputation as a lawyer, and chiefly eminent for his

obsequious servility to the usurpations of Andrew Jackson, for which

this unjust elevation to the Supreme Judicial bench was the reward.

"As to the house itself, if an article of the constitution had

prescribed, or a standing rule of the house had required, that no

other than a slaveholder should ever be its Speaker, the regulation

could not be more rigorously observed than it is by the compact

movements of the slave representation in the house. Of the last six

speakers of the house, including the present, every one has been a

slaveholder. It is so much a matter of course to see such a person

in the chair, that, if a Northern man but thinks of aspiring to the

chair, he is only made a laughing-stock for the house.

"With such consequences staring us in the face, what are we to think

when we are told that the government of the United States is a

democracy of numbers--a government by a majority of the people? Do

you not see that the one hundred representatives of persons,

property, and slavery, marching in solid phalanx upon every question

of interest to their constituents, will always outnumber the one

hundred and forty representatives only of persons and freedom,

scattered as their votes will always be by conflicting interests,

prejudices, and passions?

"But this is not all. The second party division in the house to

which I have alluded is political, and known at present by the

names of Whigs and Democrats, or Locofocos. The latter are

remarkable for an exquisite tenderness of affection for _the

people_, and especially for the poor, provided their skins are

white, and against the rich. But it is no less remarkable that the

princely slaveholders of the South are among the most thoroughgoing

of the Democrats; and their alliance with the Northern Democracy is

one of the cardinal points of their policy."

The residue of this address is devoted to a searching and severe

examination of the whole course of President Tyler's administration,

showing that "the sectional division of parties--in other words, the

conflict between freedom and slavery--is the axle round which the

administration of the national government revolves." "The political

divisions with him, and with all Southern statesmen of his stamp, are

mere instruments of power to purchase auxiliary support to the cause of

slavery even from the freemen of the North."

In closing this most illustrative address, he apologizes to his

constituents for any language he may have used in debate which might be

deemed harsh or acrimonious, and asks them to consider the adversaries

with whom he had to contend; the virulence and rancor, unparalleled in

the history of the country, with which he had been pursued; and to

remember that, "for the single offence of persisting to assert the right

of the people to petition, and the freedom of speech and of the press,

he had been twice dragged before the house to be censured and expelled."

One of his assailants, Thomas F. Marshall, had declared, in an address

to his constituents, his motives for the past, and his purposes for the

future, in the following words:

"Though petitions to dissolve the Union be poured in by thousands,

I shall not again interfere on the floor of Congress, since the

house have virtually declared that there is nothing contemptuous or

improper in offering them, and are willing again to afford Mr.

Adams an opportunity of sweeping all the strings of discord that

exist in our country. I acted as I thought for the best, being

sincerely desirous to check that man, who, if he could be removed

from the councils of the nation, or _silenced_ on the exasperating

subject to which he seems to have devoted himself, _none other, I

believe, could be found hardy enough, or bad enough, to fill his

place_."

"Besides this special and avowed malevolence against me," Mr. Adams

remarks,--"this admitted purpose to expel or silence me, for the sake

of brow-beating all other members of the free representation, by

establishing over them the reign of terror,--a peculiar system of

tactics in the house has been observed towards me, by _silencers_ of

the slave representation and their allies of the Northern Democracy."

The system of tactics to which he alludes was, first, to turn him out

of the office of chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and,

this failing, to induce a majority of the servile portion of that

committee to refuse any longer to serve with him; their purpose being

exactly that of Mr. Marshall, to remove him from the councils of the

nation, or to silence him, for the sake of _intimidating_ all others by

"an ostentatious display of a common determination not to serve with

any man who would not submit to the gag-rule, and would persist in

presenting abolition petitions." Mr. Adams then illustrates the

powerful effect of such movements to overawe members from the free

states.

"Another practice," he observed, "of this communion of Southern,

sectional, and Locofoco antipathy against me is, that I never can take

part in any debate upon an important subject, be it only upon a mere

abstraction, but a pack opens upon me of personal invective in return.

Language has no word of reproach or railing that is not hurled at me;

and the rules of the house allow me no opportunity to reply till every

other member of the house has had his turn to speak, if he pleases. By

another rule every debate is closed by a majority whenever they get

weary of it. The previous question, or a motion to lay the subject on

the table, is interposed, and I am not allowed to reply to the grossest

falsehoods and most invidious misrepresentations."

This course of party tactics Mr. Adams exhibits by a particular

narrative of the misrepresentation to which he had been subjected,

closing his statement with the following acknowledgment: "I must do many

of the members of the House of Representatives from the South the

justice to say that their treatment of me is dictated far more by the

passions and prejudices of their constituents than by their own. Were it

not for this curse of slavery, there are some of them with whom I should

be on terms of the most intimate and confidential friendship. There are

many for whom I entertain high esteem, respect, and affectionate

attachment. There are among them those who have stood by me in my

trials, and scorned to join in the league to sacrifice me as a terror to

others."

In September, 1842, at the invitation of the Norfolk County Temperance

Society, Mr. Adams delivered at Quincy an address,--not perhaps in

coïncidence with the prevailing expectations of that society, but in

perfect unison with his own characteristic spirit of independence. He

instituted an inquiry into the effect of the _principles_ of total

abstinence from the use of spirituous liquors, the administration of

pledges, or, in other words, the contracting of engagements by vows;

and examined the whole subject with reference to the essential

connection which exists between temperance and religion. In the course

of his argument he maintains that the moral principles inculcated by

the whole tenor of the Old Testament, with regard to temperance,

are,--1. That the _temperate_ use of wine is innocent, and without sin.

2. That excess in it is a heinous sin. 3. That the voluntary assumption

of a vow or pledge of total abstinence is an effort of exalted virtue,

and highly acceptable in the sight of God. 4. That the habit of excess

in the use of wine is an object of unqualified abhorrence and disgust.

He concluded with a warning to his fellow-citizens to "stand fast in

the liberty wherewith Christ has made you free, and be not entangled

again with the yoke of bondage;" and, after applauding the members of

the Norfolk County Temperance Society for their attempts to suppress

intemperance, declaring it a holy work, and invoking the blessing of

Heaven on their endeavors, he bids them "go forth as missionaries of

Christianity among their own kindred. Go, with the commendation of the

Saviour to his apostles when he first sent them forth to redeem the

world: 'Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.' In

the ardor of your zeal for moral reform forget not the rights of

personal freedom. All _excess_ is of the nature of intemperance.

Self-government is the foundation of all our political and social

institutions; and it is by self-government alone that the laws of

temperance can be enforced.... Above all, let no tincture of party

politics be mingled with the pure stream from the fountain of

temperance."

The spirit of this address, and the intimate knowledge of the Scriptures

Mr. Adams possessed, will be illustrated by the following extract:

"Throughout the whole of the Old Testament the vine is represented

as one of the most precious blessings bestowed by the Creator upon

man. In the incomparable fable of Jotham, when he lifted up his

voice on the summit of Mount Gerizim, and cried to the men of

Shechem, 'Hearken unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken

unto you,' he told them that when the trees of the forest went

forth to anoint them a king to reign over them, they offered the

crown successively to the olive-tree, the fig-tree, and the _vine_.

They all declined to accept the royal dignity; and when it came to

the turn of the vine to assign the reasons for his refusal, he

said, 'Should I leave my _wine_, which cheereth God and man, and go

to be promoted over the trees?' In the one hundred and fourth

Psalm,--that most magnificent of all descriptions of the glory, the

omnipotence, and the goodness of the Creator, God,--wine is

enumerated among the richest of his blessings bestowed upon man.

'He causeth the grass to grow,' says the Psalmist, 'for the cattle,

and herb for the service of man, that he may bring forth food out

of the earth, and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil

to make his face to shine, and bread that strengtheneth man's

heart.'

"But, while wine was thus classed among the choicest comforts and

necessaries of life, the cautions and injunctions against the

inordinate use of it are repeated and multiplied in every variety

of form. 'Wine is a mocker,' says Solomon (Prov. 20:1); 'strong

drink is raging; and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.'

'He that loveth pleasure shall be a poor man; he that loveth wine

and oil shall not be rich.' (21:17.) 'Who hath woe? who hath

sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds

without cause? who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry _long_ at

the wine; they that go _to seek_ mixed wine. Look not thou upon the

wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it

moveth itself aright,'--say, like sparkling Champagne.--'At the

_last_ it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. Thine

eyes shall behold strange wonders, and thine heart shall utter

perverse things; yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the

midst of the sea, or as he that lieth on the top of a mast. They

have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they have

beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it

yet again.' Never was so exquisite a picture of drunkenness and the

drunkard painted by the hand of man.

"Yet in all this there is no interdict upon the _use_ of wine.

The caution and the precept are against excess."

On the 29th of May, 1843, Mr. Adams delivered before the Massachusetts

Historical Society a discourse in celebration of the Second Centennial

Anniversary of the New England Confederacy of 1643. This work is

characterized by that breadth and depth of research for which he was

distinguished and eminently qualified. It includes traces of the early

settlements of Virginia, New England, Pennsylvania, and New York; of the

causes of each, and the spirit in which they were made and conducted,

and of the principles which they applied in their intercourse with the

aboriginals of the forest. He then proceeds to give an account of the

confederation of the four New England colonies, Plymouth, Massachusetts,

Connecticut, and New Haven, in 1643, with appropriate statements of the

principles and conduct of the founders of each settlement, and of the

character and motives of the leaders of each of them.

The origin, motives, and objects of that confederation, he explains;

analyzing the distribution of power between the commissioners of the

whole confederacy and among the separate governments of the colonies,

and showing that it combined the same identical principles with those

which gathered and united the thirteen English colonies as the prelude

to the Revolution which severed them forever from their national

connection with Great Britain; and that the New England Confederacy of

1643 was the model and prototype of the North American Confederacy of

1774.

His sketch of the founder of the Colony of Rhode Island will give a

general idea of the spirit and bearing of this discourse:

"Roger Williams was a man who maybe considered the very

impersonation of a combined conscientious and contentious spirit.

Born in the land of Sir Hugh Evans and Captain Fluellen, educated at

the University of Oxford, at the very period when the monarchical

Episcopal Church of England was purging herself, as by fire, from

the corruptions of the despotic and soul-degrading Church of Rome,

he arrived at Boston in February, 1630, about half a year after the

landing of the Massachusetts Colony of Governor Winthrop. He was an

eloquent preacher, stiff and self-confident in his opinions;

ingenious, powerful, and commanding, in impressing them upon others;

inflexible in his adherence to them; and, by an inconsistency

peculiar to religious enthusiasts, combining the most amiable and

affectionate sympathies of the heart with the most repulsive and

inexorable exclusions of conciliation, compliance, or intercourse,

with his adversaries in opinion.

"On his first arrival he went to Salem, and there soon made himself

so acceptable by his preaching, that the people of Mr. Skelton's

church invited him to settle with them as his colleague. But he had

broached, and made no hesitation in maintaining, two opinions

imminently dangerous to the very existence of the Massachusetts

Colony, and certainly not remarkable for that spirit of charity or

toleration upon which he afterwards founded his own government, and

which now, in after ages, constitutes his brightest title to renown.

The first of these opinions was that the royal charter to the Colony

of Massachusetts was a nullity, because the King of England had no

right to grant lands in foreign countries, which belonged of right

to their native inhabitants. This opinion struck directly at all

right of property held under the authority of the royal charter,

and, followed to its logical conclusions, would have proved the

utter impotence of the royal charter to confer power of government,

any more than it could convey property in the soil.

"The other opinion was that the Church of Boston was criminal for

having omitted to make a public declaration of repentance for having

held communion with the Church of England before their emigration;

and upon that ground he had refused to join in communion with the

Church of Boston.

"By the subtlety and vehemence of his persuasive powers he had

prevailed upon Endicott to look upon the cross of St. George in the

banners of England as a badge of idolatry, and to cause it actually

to be cut out of the flag floating at the fort in Salem. The red

cross of St. George in the national banner of England was a grievous

and odious eye-sore to multitudes, probably to a great majority, of

the Massachusetts colonists; but, in the eyes of the government of

the colony, it was the sacred badge of allegiance to the monarchy at

home, already deeply jealous of the purposes and designs of the

Puritan colony."

On the 4th of July, 1843, Mr. Adams, in a letter addressed to the

citizens of Bangor, in Maine, declining their invitation to deliver an

address on the 1st of August, the anniversary of British emancipation of

slavery in the West Indies, thus expressed his views on that subject:

"The extinction of SLAVERY from the face of the earth is a problem,

moral, political, religious, which at this moment rocks the

foundations of human society throughout the regions of civilized

man. It is indeed nothing more nor less than the consummation of

the Christian religion. It is only as _immortal_ beings that all

mankind can in any sense be said to be born equal; and when the

Declaration of Independence affirms as a self-evident truth that

all men are born equal, it is precisely the same as if the

affirmation had been that all men are born with immortal souls;

for, take away from man his soul, the immortal spirit that is

within him, and he would be a mere tamable beast of the field, and,

like others of his kind, would become the property of his tamer.

Hence it is, too, that, by the law of nature and of God, man can

never be made the property of man. And herein consists the fallacy

with which the holders of slaves often delude themselves, by

assuming that the test of property is human law. The soul of one

man cannot by human law be made the property of another. The owner

of a slave is the owner of a living corpse; but he is not the owner

of a man."

In illustration of this principle he observes that "the natural

equality of mankind, affirmed by the signers of the Declaration of

Independence to be _held up_ by them as self-evident truth, was not so

held by their enemies. Great Britain held that sovereign power was

unlimitable, and the natural equality of mankind was a fable. France

and Spain had no sympathies for the rights of human nature. Vergennes

plotted with Gustavus of Sweden the revolution in Sweden from liberty

to despotism. Turgot, shortly after our Declaration of Independence,

advised Louis Sixteenth that it was for _the interest_ of France and

Spain that the insurrection of the Anglo-American colonies _should be

suppressed_. But none of them foresaw or imagined what would be the

consequence of the triumphant establishment in the continent of North

America of an Anglo-Saxon American nation on the foundation of the

natural equality of mankind, and the inalienable rights of man."

Mr. Adams then states and reasons upon these consequences in Europe and

the United States: the abolition of slavery by the judicial decision of

the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, three years after the Declaration of

Independence. Since that day there has not been a slave within that

state. The same principle is corroborated by the fact that the

Declaration of Independence imputes slavery in Virginia to George the

Third, as one of the crimes which proved him to be a tyrant, unfit to

rule a free people; and that at least twenty slaveholders, if not

thirty, among whom were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, avowed

abolitionists, were signers of that Declaration.

He next states that "the result of the North American revolutionary war

had prepared the minds of the people of the British nation to

contemplate with calm composure the new principle engrafted upon the

association of the civilized race of man, the self-evident truth, the

natural equality of mankind and the rights of man." He then introduces

Anthony Benezet, a member of the society of Friends, and Granville

Sharp, an English philanthropist, "blowing the single horn of human

liberty and the natural equality of mankind against the institution of

slavery, practised from time immemorial by all nations, ancient and

modern; supported by the denunciation of the traffic in slaves by the

popular writers both in France and England,--by Locke, Addison, and

Sterne, as well as by Raynal, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire;

succeeded by the association of Thomas Clarkson and two or three

Englishmen together, for the purpose of arraying the power of the

British empire for the total abolition of slavery throughout the earth."

The success of that association he next illustrates,--until this

"emanation of the Christian faith is now, under the cross of St. George,

overflowing from the white cliffs of Albion, and sweeping the

slave-trade and slavery from the face of the terraqueous globe." He

proceeds:

"People of that renowned island!--children of the land of our

forefathers!--proceed, proceed in this glorious career, till the

whole earth shall be redeemed from the greatest curse that ever has

afflicted the human race. Proceed until millions upon millions of

your brethren of the human race, restored to the rights with which

they were endowed by your and their Creator, but of which they have

been robbed by ruffians of their own race, shall send their choral

shouts of redemption to the skies in blessings upon your names. O,

with what pungent mortification and shame must I confess that in the

transcendent glories of that day our names will not be associated

with yours! May Heaven in mercy grant that we may be spared the

deeper damnation of seeing our names recorded, not among the

liberators, but with the oppressors of mankind!"

After inquiring what we have done in the United States to support "the

principle proclaimed to the world as that which was to be the vital

spark of our existence as a community among the nations of the earth,"

and declaring that we have done nothing, he thus enumerates the

proceedings which disqualify us from presuming to share in the

festivities and unite in the songs of triumph of the 1st of August, and

shows how little we have concurred with Great Britain in her attempts to

break the chain of slavery. He inquires into what we are doing:

"Are we not suffering our own hands to be manacled, and our

own feet to be fettered, with the chains of slavery? Is it not

enough to be told that, by a fraudulent perversion of language in

the constitution of the United States, we have falsified the

constitution itself, by admitting into both the legislative and

executive departments of the government an overwhelming

representation of one species of _property_, to the exclusion of

all others, and that the odious property in slaves?

"Is it not enough that, by this exclusive privilege of property

representation, confined to one section of the country, an

irresistible ascendency in the action of the general government has

been secured, not indeed to that section, but to an oligarchy of

slaveholders in that section--to the cruel oppression of the poor

in that same section itself? Is it not enough that, by the

operation of this radical iniquity in the organization of the

government, an immense disproportion of all offices, from the

highest to the lowest, civil, military, naval, executive, and

judicial, are held by slaveholders? Have we not seen the sacred

right of petition totally suppressed for the people of the free

states during a succession of years, and is it not yet inexorably

suppressed? Have we not seen, for the last twenty years, the

constitution and solemn treaties with foreign nations trampled on

by cruel oppression and lawless imprisonment of colored mariners

in the Southern States, in cold-blooded defiance of a solemn

adjudication by a Southern judge in the Circuit Court of the Union?

And is not this enough? Have not the people of the free states been

required to renounce for their citizens the right of habeas corpus

and trial by jury; and, to coërce that base surrender of the only

practical security to all personal rights, have not the

slave-breeders, by state legislation, subjected to fine and

imprisonment the colored citizens of the free states, for merely

coming within their jurisdiction? Have we not tamely submitted for

years to the daily violation of the freedom of the post-office and

of the press by a committee of seal-breakers? And have we not seen

a sworn Postmaster-general formally avow that, though he could not

license this cut-purse protection of the peculiar institution, the

perpetrators of this highway robbery must justify themselves by the

plea of necessity? And has the pillory or the penitentiary been the

reward of that Postmaster-general? Have we not seen

printing-presses destroyed; halls erected for the promotion of

human freedom levelled with the dust, and consumed by fire; and

wanton, unprovoked murder perpetrated with impunity, by

slave-mongers? Have we not seen human beings, made in the likeness

of God, and endowed with immortal souls, burnt at the stake, not

for their offences, but for their color? Are not the journals of

our Senate disgraced by resolutions calling for _war_, to indemnify

the slave-pirates of the Enterprise and the Creole for the

self-emancipation of their slaves; and to inflict vengeance, by a

death of torture, upon the heroic self-deliverance of Madison

Washington? Have we not been fifteen years plotting rebellion

against our neighbor republic of Mexico, for abolishing slavery

throughout all her provinces? Have we not aided and abetted one of

her provinces in insurrection against her for that cause? And have

we not invaded openly, and sword in hand, another of her provinces,

and all to effect her dismemberment, and to add ten more slave

states to our confederacy? Has not the cry of war for the conquest

of Mexico, for the expansion of reïnstituted slavery, for the

robbery of priests, and the plunder of religious establishments,

yet subsided? Have the pettifogging, hair-splitting, nonsensical,

and yet inflammatory bickerings about the right of search,

pandering to the thirst for revenge in France, panting for war to

prostrate the disputed title of her king--has the sound of this

war-trumpet yet faded away upon our ears? Has the supreme and

unparalleled absurdity of stipulating by treaty to keep a squadron

of eighty guns for five years without intermission upon the coast

of Africa, to suppress the African slave-trade, and at the same

time denying, at the point of the bayonet, the right of that

squadron to board or examine any slaver all but sinking under a

cargo of victims, if she but hoist a foreign flag--has this

diplomatic bone been yet picked clean? Or is our _indirect_

participation in the African slave-trade to be protected, at

whatever expense of blood and treasure? Is the supreme Executive

Chief of this commonwealth yet to speak not for himself, but

for her whole people, and pledge _them_ to shoulder their

muskets, and to endorse their knapsacks, against the fanatical,

non-resistant abolitionists, whenever the overseers may please to

raise the bloody flag with the swindling watch-word of 'Union'?

O, my friends, I have not the heart to join in the festivity on

the First of August--the British anniversary of disenthralled

humanity--while all this, and infinitely more that I could tell,

but that I would spare the blushes of my country, weigh down my

spirits with the uncertainty, sinking into my grave as I am,

whether she is doomed to be numbered among the first liberators

or the last oppressors of the race of immortal man!

"Let the long-trodden-down African, restored by the cheering voice

and Christian hand of Britain to his primitive right and condition

of manhood, clap his hands and shout for joy on the anniversary of

the First of August. Let the lordly Briton strip off much of his

pride on other days of the year, and reserve it all for the pride of

conscious beneficence on this day. What lover of classical learning

can read the account in Livy, or in Plutarch, of the restoration to

freedom of the Grecian cities by the Roman consul Flaminius, without

feeling his bosom heave, and his blood flow cheerily in his veins?

The heart leaps with sympathy when we read that, on the first

proclamation by the herald, the immense assembled multitude, in the

tumult of astonishment and joy, could scarcely believe their own

ears, and made him repeat the proclamation, and then '_Tum ab

certo jam gaudio, tantus cum clamore, plausus est ortus, totiesque

repetitus, ut facile appararet nihil omnium bonorum multitudini

gratius quam libertatem esse_.--Then rang the welkin with long

and redoubled shouts of exultation, clearly proving that, of all the

enjoyments accessible to the hearts of men, nothing is so delightful

to them as liberty.' Upwards of two thousand years have revolved

since that day, and the First of August is to the Briton of this age

what the day of the proclamation of Flaminius was to the ancient

Roman. Yes! let them celebrate the First of August as the day to

them of deliverance and glory; and leave to us the pleasant

employment of commenting upon their motives, of devising means to

shelter the African slaver from their search, and of squandering

millions to support, on a pestilential coast, a squadron of the

stripes and stars, with instructions sooner to scuttle their ships

than to molest the pirate slaver who shall make his flagstaff the

herald of a lie!"

In July, 1843, the Cincinnati Astronomical Society earnestly solicited

Mr. Adams to lay the corner-stone of their Observatory. No invitation

could have been more coïncident with the prevailing interest of his

heart, and he immediately accepted it, notwithstanding his advanced age,

and the great distance which the performance of the duty required him to

travel. Some of his constituents having questioned the propriety of this

acceptance, and expressed doubts whether the duties it imposed were

compatible with his other public obligations, Mr. Adams, in an address

to them, at Dedham, on the 4th of July, took occasion to state that the

encouragement of the arts and sciences, and of all good literature, is

expressly enjoined by the constitution of Massachusetts. The patronage

and encouragement of them is therefore one of the most sacred duties of

the people of that state, and enjoined upon them and their children as a

part of their duty to God. "The voices of your forefathers, founders of

your social compact, calling from their graves, command you to this

duty; and I deem it, as your representative, a tacit and standing

instruction from you to perform, as far as may be my ability, that part

of your constitutional duty for you. It is in this sense that, in

accepting the earnest invitation from a respectable and learned society,

in a far distant state and city of the Union, to unite with them in the

act of erecting an edifice for the observation of the heavens, and

thereby encouraging the science of astronomy, I am fulfilling an

obligation of duty to you, and in your service." The nature of this duty

he thus illustrates:

"From the Ptolemies of Egypt and Alexander of Macedon, from Julius

Cæsar to the Arabian Caliphs Haroun al Raschid, Almamon, and

Almansor, from Alphonso of Castile to Nicholas, the present Emperor

of all the Russias,--who, at the expense of one million of rubles,

has erected at Pulkova the most perfect and best-appointed

observatory in the world,--royal and imperial power has never been

exercised with more glory, never more remembered with the applause

and gratitude of mankind, than when extending the hand of patronage

and encouragement to the science of astronomy. You have neither

Cæsar nor Czar, Caliph, Emperor, nor King, to monopolize this glory

by largesses extracted from the fruits of your industry. The

founders of your constitution have left it as their dying

commandment to you, to achieve, as the lawful sovereigns of the

land, this resplendent glory to yourselves--to patronize and

encourage the arts and sciences, and all good literature."

Mr. Adams left Quincy for Cincinnati on the 25th of October, and

returned to Washington on the 24th of November. At Saratoga, Rochester,

Buffalo, he was received with marked attention; and in every place where

he rested assemblages of the inhabitants took occasion to evidence their

respect and interest in his character by congratulatory addresses, and

welcomed his presence by every token of civility and regard. At Columbus

he was met by a deputation from Cincinnati, and, in approaching that

city, he was escorted into it by a procession and cavalcade. No

demonstration of honor and gratitude for the exertion he had made, and

the fatigues he had undergone, for their gratification, was omitted. His

whole progress was an ovation.

In the presence of a large concourse of the citizens of Cincinnati, Mr.

Adams was introduced to the Astronomical Society by its president, Judge

Burnet, who gave, in an appropriate address, a rapid sketch of the

history of his life and his public services, touching with delicacy and

judgment on the trials to which his political course had been subjected.

The following tributes, from their truth, justice, and appropriateness,

are entitled to distinct remembrance:

"Being a son of one of the framers and defenders of the Declaration

of Independence, his political principles were formed in the school

of the sages of the Revolution, from whom he imbibed the spirit of

liberty while he was yet a boy.

"Having been brought up among the immediate descendants of the

Puritan fathers, whose landing in Massachusetts in the winter of

1620 gave immortality to the rock of Plymouth, his moral and

religious impressions were derived from a source of the most rigid

purity; and his manners and habits were formed in a community where

ostentation and extravagance had no place. In this fact we see why

it is that he has always been distinguished for his purity of

motive, simplicity of manners, and republican plainness in his style

of living and in his intercourse with society. To the same causes

may be ascribed his firmness, his directness of purpose, and his

unyielding adherence to personal as well as political liberty. You

have recently seen him stand as unmoved as the rock of Gibraltar,

defending the right of petition, and the constitutional privileges

of the representatives of the people, assembled in Congress, though

fiercely assailed by friends and by foes.

"It is a remarkable fact that during the whole of his public life,

which has already continued more than half a century, he never

connected himself with a political party, or held himself bound to

support or oppose any measure for the purpose of advancing or

retarding the views of a party; but he has held himself free at all

times to pursue the course which duty pointed out, however he may

have been considered by some as adhering to a party. This fact

discloses the reason why he has been applauded at times, and at

other times censured, by every party which has existed under the

government. The truth is that, while the American people have been

divided into two great political sections, each contending for its

own aggrandizement, Mr. Adams has stood between them, uninfluenced

by either, contending for the aggrandizement of the nation. His

life has been in some respects _sui generis_; and I venture the

opinion that, generally, when his course has differed most from the

politicians opposed to him, it has tended most to the advancement

of the public good.

"As a proof of the desire Mr. Adams has always cherished for the

advancement of science, I might refer to his annual message to

Congress in December, 1825, in which he recommended the

establishment of a National University, and an Astronomical

Observatory, and referred to the hundred and thirty of those

'light-houses of the skies' existing in Europe, as casting a

reproach on our country for its unpardonable negligence on that

important subject. The manner in which that recommendation was

received and treated can never be forgotten. It must at this day be

a source of great comfort to that devoted friend of science that

those who yet survive of the highly-excited party which attempted to

cast on him reproach and ridicule for that proposition, and

especially for assimilating those establishments to light-houses of

the skies, have recently admitted the wisdom of his advice by making

ample appropriations to accomplish the very object he then proposed."

The oration Mr. Adams delivered on that occasion is, perhaps, the most

extraordinary of his literary efforts, evidencing his comprehensive

grasp of the subject, and the intensity of his interest in it. It

embraces an outline of the history of astronomy, illustrated by an

elevated and excited spirit of philosophy. Those who cultivated, those

who patronized, and those who advanced it, are celebrated, and the

events of their lives and the nature of their services are briefly

related. The operations of the mind which are essential to its progress

are touched upon. The intense labor and peculiar intellectual

qualifications incident to and required for its successful pursuit are

intimated. Nor are the inventors of those optical instruments, who had

contributed to the advancement of this science beyond all previous

anticipation, omitted in this extensive survey of its nature, progress,

and history.

After celebrating "the gigantic energies and more than heroic labors of

Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo," he pronounced Newton "the

consummation of them all."

"It was his good fortune," observed Mr. Adams, "to be born and to live

in a country where there was no college of cardinals to cast him into

prison, and doom him to spend his days in repeating the seven

penitential psalms, for shedding light upon the world, and publishing

mathematical truths. Newton was not persecuted by the dull and ignorant

instruments of political or ecclesiastical power. He lived in honor

among his countrymen; was a member of one Parliament, received the

dignity of knighthood, held for many years a lucrative office, and at

his decease was interred in solemn state in Westminster Abbey, where a

monument records his services to mankind, among the sepulchres of the

British kings.

"From the days of Newton down to the present hour, the science of

astronomy has been cultivated, with daily deepening interest, by all the

civilized nations of Europe--by England, France, Prussia, Sweden,

several of the German and Italian states, and, above all, by Russia,

whose present sovereign has made the pursuit of knowledge a truly

imperial virtue."

After speaking of the patronage extended to this science by the nations

and sovereigns of Europe, he terminates his developments with this

stirring appeal to his own countrymen:

"But what, in the mean time, have we been doing? While our fathers

were colonists of England we had no distinctive political or

literary character. The white cliffs of Albion covered the soil of

our nativity, though another hemisphere first opened our eyes on

the light of day, and oceans rolled between us and them. We were

Britons born, and we claimed to be the countrymen of Chaucer and

Shakspeare, Milton and Newton, Sidney and Locke, Arthur and Alfred,

as well as of Edward the Black Prince, Harry of Monmouth, and

Elizabeth. But when our fathers abjured the name of Britons, and

'assumed among the nations of the earth the separate and equal

station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled

them,' they tacitly contracted the engagement for themselves, and

above all for their posterity, to contribute, in their corporate

and national capacity, their full share, ay, and more than their

full share, of the virtues that elevate and of the graces that

adorn the character of civilized man. They announced themselves as

_reformers_ of the institution of civil society. They spoke of the

laws of nature, and in the name of nature's God; and by that sacred

adjuration they pledged us, their children, to labor with united

and concerted energy, from the cradle to the grave, to purge the

earth of all slavery; to restore the race of man to the full

enjoyment of those rights which the God of nature had bestowed upon

him at his birth; to disenthrall his limbs from chains, to break

the fetters from his feet and the manacles from his hands, and set

him free for the use of all his physical powers for the improvement

of his own condition. The God in whose name they spoke had taught

them, in the revelation of the Gospel, that the only way in which

man can discharge his duty to Him is by loving his neighbor as

himself, and doing with him as he would be done by; respecting his

rights while enjoying his own, and applying all his emancipated

powers of body and of mind to self-improvement and the improvement

of his race."