JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
If I were asked to name the man who, next to Salmon P. Chase, most
effectually and meritoriously contributed to the liberation of the
black man in this country, I should unhesitatingly say John Quincy
Adams.
By the great majority of those now living Mr. Adams is known only as
having once been President of the United States and as belonging to a
very distinguished family. His name is rarely mentioned. There was a
time, however, when no other name was heard so often in this country,
or which, when used, excited such violent and conflicting emotions. It
can justly be said that for many years John Quincy Adams, individually
and practically alone, by his services in Congress, sustained what
Anti-Slavery sentiment there was in the nation. It was but a spark,
but he kept it alive and gradually extended its conflagration.
When Adams entered Congress opposition to slavery was at its lowest
ebb. It was almost extinct. The victory of the slaveholders in the
Missouri contest had elated them most tremendously and had
correspondingly depressed and cowed their adversaries. As a general
thing, the latter had given up all idea of making any further fight.
Northern Presidents, Northern Congressmen, Northern editors, Northern
churchmen, were the most ready and servile supporters slavery had.
Anti-Slavery societies had been abandoned. Anti-Slavery journals had
perished. Disapprovers of the "institution," with the exception of a
few men of the Lundy stamp and the Lundy obscurity, were silent. There
was one magnificent exception.
It was at that crisis that John Quincy Adams entered Congress and
began a fight against slavery that, covering a period of seventeen
years, literally lasted to the last day of his life. He was carried
helpless and dying from the floor of Congress, where he had fallen
when in the discharge of his duties.
The position of Mr. Adams, who had been elected as an independent
candidate, was unique. He owed his official place to no political
party, and was, therefore, free from party shackles in regulating his
course. He took up the fight for the black man's freedom as one who
was himself absolutely free. Most wonderfully did he conduct that
fight. There was nothing in the eloquence of Demosthenes in Athens, of
Cicero in Rome, of Mirabeau in France, of Pitt or Gladstone in
England, that surpassed the force and grandeur of the philippics of
Adams against American slavery. Alone, for the greater part of his
service in Congress, he stood in the midst of his malignant assailants
like a rock in a stormy sea. Old man that he was, plainly showing the
in-roads of physical weakness, he was in that body of distinguished
and able men more than a match for any or all of his antagonists. He
was always "the old man eloquent." Says one of our leading historical
writers:
"As a parliamentary debater he had few, if any, superiors. In
knowledge and dexterity there was no one in the House that could
be compared with him. He was literally a walking cyclopedia. He
was terrible in invective, matchless at repartee, and insensible
to fear. A single-handed fight against all the slaveholders in the
House was something upon which he was always ready to enter."
Speaking of his effectiveness in congressional encounters another
Congressman writes:
"He is, I believe, the most extraordinary man living. I have with
my own eyes seen the slaveholders literally quake and tremble
through every nerve and joint, when he arraigned before them their
political and moral sins. His power of speech has exceeded any
conception I have heretofore had of the force of words or logic."
At last his enemies in Congress decided that they would endure his
attacks no longer. They took counsel together and agreed upon a plan
of operations looking to his expulsion from that body. As one of his
biographers, also a distinguished Congressman, expressed it: "It was
the preconcerted and deliberate purpose of the slave-masters to make
an example of the ringleader of political Abolitionism. They meant to
humiliate and crush him, and this they did not doubt their power to
do."
Mr. Adams submitted a petition, without giving it his personal
endorsement, asking for a dissolution of the Union. That furnished the
pretext his enemies wanted. They accused him of treason in
countenancing an assault upon the Union, although they were at the time
engaged in laying the foundation of a movement looking to its ultimate
overthrow. The outcome of this undertaking was one of the most
thrilling scenes ever witnesssd in the American Congress; or, for that
matter, in any other deliberative assembly.
Preparations for the affair were made with great elaborateness. The
galleries were filled with the friends, male and female, of
pro-slavery Congressmen. The beauty and chivalry of the South were
there. They had come to witness the abasement of the great enemy of
their most cherished institution. They were to see him driven from the
nation's council chamber, a crushed and dishonored man. Not one
friendly face looked down upon him as he sat coolly awaiting the
attack, and upon the floor about him were few of his colleagues that
gave him their sympathies.
The two most eloquent Congressmen from the South were selected to lead
the prosecution. One was the celebrated Henry A. Wise, of Virginia;
the other "Tom" Marshall, of Kentucky. The latter opened the
proceedings by offering a resolution charging Mr. Adams with
treasonable conduct and directing his expulsion. He supported it with
a speech of much ingenuity. Wise followed in a fiery diatribe. Both
speakers imprudently indulged in personal allusions of a somewhat
scandalous nature, thus laying themselves open, with episodes in their
careers of questionable propriety, to retaliation from a man who
thoroughly knew their records. At this point we have the testimony of
an eye-witness:
"Then uprose that bald, gray old man of seventy-five, his hands
tremulous with constitutional infirmity and age, upon whose
consecrated head the vials of tyrannic wrath had been outpoured.
Unexcited he raised his voice, high-keyed, as was usual with him,
but clear, untremulous, and firm. Almost in a moment his
infirmities disappeared, although his shaking hand could not but
be noted, trembling, not with fear, but with age."
His speech was absolutely crushing. He met every point that had been
urged against him and triumphantly refuted it. He handled his
oratorical antagonists with merciless severity, depicting certain
events in their lives with such vividness that the onlookers gazed
upon them with visible and unmistakable pity. Said one of these men
when he afterwards understood that a certain party was about to engage
in a controversial debate with Mr. Adams, "Then may the Lord have
mercy on him."
Mr. Adams was not expelled. His opponents frankly admitted their
discomfiture and dropped the whole business.
It cannot be denied that John Quincy Adams, almost by his unaided
efforts, preserved and sustained the life of the Anti-Slavery cause at
a time when it was almost moribund. He plowed the ground, cutting a
deep and broad furrow as he went his way, and in the upturned soil
such laborers as Birney and Garrison and Chase planted the seed that
rooted and grew until it yielded a plentiful harvest.