A Disease in the Public Mind (22 page)

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Adams's thinking about slavery was complex. Early in his political career he had abandoned the Federalist Party and become a Jeffersonian Republican. That virtually guaranteed he would say nothing against slavery publicly. Privately, however, he loathed the institution. During the Missouri Compromise crisis in 1819 and 1820, when he was President James Monroe's secretary of state, he had taken no part in the controversy but confided some revealing thoughts to his diary:

If slavery be the destined sword in the hand of the destroying angel which is to sever the ties of this Union, the same sword will cut in sunder the bonds of slavery itself. A dissolution of the Union . . . for the cause of slavery would be followed by a servile war in the slave holding states, combined with a war between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result must be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent; and, calamitous and desolating as this course of events . . . must be, so glorious would be its final issue, that, as God shall judge me, I dare not say it is not to be desired.
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A few days before Adams returned to Washington, DC, as a congressman, he had a talk with a young French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was researching a book about the United States that would make him famous—
Democracy in America.
De Tocqueville asked Adams if he thought slavery was a great evil for the nation. “Yes, unquestionably,” Adams replied. “It's in slavery that are to be found all the embarrassments of the present and fears of the future.” But Adams also made it clear that his view of blacks made him dubious about freeing them immediately, as his fellow New Englander William Lloyd Garrison was demanding.

Speaking from his experience as a resident of Washington, DC, for almost two decades, Adams said: “I know nothing more insolent than a black when he is not speaking to his master and is not afraid of being beaten.” Black women slaves were even worse. He had seen them “make frequent abuse of the kindness of their mistresses. They know that it isn't customary to inflict bodily punishment on them.”
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Slowly, reluctantly, Congressman Adams was stirred to action by the measures that Southerners demanded as their anger at abolitionism increased. They wanted changes in the postal laws that would enable southern postmasters to weed out antislavery literature. They called for better enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. They wrathfully refused to consider abolitionist petitions to Congress. No one said a word about their underlying fear of a
slave insurrection. More and more, they declaimed that they had a right to own slaves, thanks to the compromises in the Constitutional Convention that had won Southern support for the national charter.

As Adams sat at his desk in the House of Representatives listening to these tirades, he wrote a plaintive letter to his son Charles: “The voice of freedom has not yet been heard, and I am earnestly urged to speak in her name. She will be trampled under foot if I do not, and I shall be trampled under foot if I do. . . . What can I do?”

Those words suggest that Adams felt impelled to oppose the southern readiness to stifle freedom of speech—one of the fundamental rights that James Otis and John Adams and the other men of their Revolutionary generation had vowed to defend. But Adams the politician, who still hungered for another term in the White House, said little as Congress authorized postmasters to search the mail for antislavery pamphlets or books and dismissed proposals to ban slavery in the District of Columbia.

Senator John C. Calhoun summed up the South's view on the latter point in a stentorian declaration: meddling with slavery in the nation's capital would be “a foul slander on nearly one half the states of the Union.” Calhoun's stance underscored another significant shift in the Southern attitude toward slavery. Instead of apologizing for it as an evil necessity, the South Carolina senator and many others began claiming there was nothing morally wrong with it.
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In spite of his inner hesitations, Congressman Adams became one of the most inveterate introducers of antislavery petitions, even though few of the dozens he presented in each session of Congress came from the voters who had elected him. His fame as an ex-president made him a favorite recipient for many petitioners. By 1836 he was on his feet almost daily, urging Congress to at least give these citizens the courtesy of considering some of their requests. “Over head and ears in debate,” he wrote to Charles. “I have taken up the glove . . . I had no alternative left.”

Although he was tormented by sciatica and lumbago, which deprived him of badly needed sleep, the aging ex-president found the combat strangely invigorating. “A skirmishing day,” Adams told Charles in another letter. He had made a point of reading aloud each of three petitions to the last line, while Southerners, trapped by the House rules, impotently growled and grumbled.

After his reading, Adams sat down and listened almost cheerfully to the ferocious rebuttals and denunciations of his defiance of the majority's wishes. He knew that “one hundred members of the House represent slaves.” An additional forty members from nonslave states sided with their fellow Democrats. The other hundred and twenty representatives ranged from cold to lukewarm on antislavery and “are ready to desert me at the very first scintillation of indiscretion on my part.”
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Only a handful of congressmen from New England and their Midwest diaspora supported Adams. This huge imbalance emboldened the Southerners to make a serious blunder. In May 1836, a committee headed by Henry Laurens Pinckney of South Carolina introduced three resolutions. The first declared Congress could never interfere with slavery in any state. The second was a resolution to bar future Congresses from interfering with slavery in the District of Columbia. Adams surprised everyone by voting for both proposals.

Then came the resolution that brought the ex-president to his feet, ablaze with protest. “All petitions memorials, resolutions or papers relating in any way or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without either being printed or referred, be laid on the table, and that no further action shall be taken thereon.” Soon called “the gag rule,” the idea had the tacit approval of Speaker of the House James K. Polk of Tennessee, who cut off attempts to debate it.

Congressman Adams repeatedly broke into discussions of other matters to denounce the idea of violating free speech in this brutal way. On May 26, 1836, the House voted on the gag rule. When the clerk of the House called: “Congressman Adams?” the ex-president roared: “I hold the resolution to be a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, of the Rules of
this House, and of the rights of my Constituents!” The House voted in favor of the proposal, 117 to 69.

The gag-rulers' victory only made Adams resolve to resist it as long as he had breath and voice. He convinced himself that he would be fighting for the preservation of the Union. “This is the cause upon which I am entering the last stage of my life,” he told a friend.
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Usually, the Senate was not influenced by the agitations of the House of Representatives. Pennsylvania's James Buchanan did not foresee any fuss when he introduced a petition from Quakers calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Buchanan quickly added that he did not share the opinion, but felt it was his duty to present it. Everyone understood what the freshman senator meant. Quakers were a significant portion of the electorate in Pennsylvania. Buchanan, who had spent a decade in the House, knew his state's political geography.

“Buck” Buchanan was a tall, heavy-set man with a strangely lopsided face, due to an eye problem that caused him to tilt his head to the left. His close friendship with Alabama's Senator William Rufus Devane King was already prompting covert smiles. President Andrew Jackson, among others, had called the fastidious King a “Miss Nancy.” Some historians have suggested—or wondered if—Buchanan was gay. Others have cited a tragic youthful romance with an attractive woman who died suddenly, prompting him to vow never to marry.

As a bachelor, Buchanan had gravitated to southern politicians who often left their wives on their plantations and lived in Washington hotels and boarding houses. He roomed with Senator King until he died after a long struggle with tuberculosis in 1853. Other southern senators also became close friends.

Buchanan had made a fortune as a lawyer and investor and supported a remarkable number of orphaned nieces, nephews, and cousins, all of whom swirled through and around his mansion, “Wheatland,” outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He had made his opinion of slavery clear in a speech in the
House of Representatives. He saw it as a political and moral evil that could not be remedied without the introduction of “evils infinitely greater.” For him, abolition was virtually synonymous with a race war against “high-minded . . . southern men.”

Senator Buchanan was more than a little shaken when Senator John C. Calhoun responded to his antislavery petition by angrily urging the Senate to institute its own gag rule. The debate raged for two months without reaching anything close to a majority backing the South Carolina senator. Buchanan was appalled by the rancor on both sides. Slavery was obviously a topic that virtually annihilated the Senate's tradition of courtesy and mutual respect. It is easy to see why Senator Buchanan became convinced that abolitionism was a disease in the public mind. Alas, his southern sympathies made it impossible for him to see that other diseases spawned by slavery were distorting the public mind of the South.
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John Quincy Adams rapidly became the most powerful Washington, DC, voice opposing Senator Calhoun and his fellow defenders of slavery. Daniel Webster, distracted by his desire to become president, struggled to find some middle ground between proslavery and antislavery and fell far behind him. People began calling the former president “Old Man Eloquent”—a title lifted from a poem by John Milton. The nickname must have galled Webster, who saw himself as Congress's great orator.

Adams was soon galling the Southerners in the House of Representatives far more with his relentless opposition to the gag rule. The abolitionists gleefully cooperated with him. In the years 1837 and 1838, they deluged Congress with petitions—130,200 for banning slavery from the District of Columbia, 32,000 for the repeal of the gag rule. Each petition had hundreds and often thousands of signatures on it. Other antislavery causes also drew large numbers of petitions. By violating the right to free speech with their gag rule, Southerners had added tens of thousands of people to the antislavery cause.

The abolitionists devised other ways to exacerbate the damage. They persuaded thousands of women to petition for their civil rights. Would the
Southern Democrats and their Northern allies dare to gag them too? Adams promptly put the Democrats to the test. When a Georgia congressman protested against Adams's presentation of a rights petition from the women of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the ex-president claimed to be shocked. Would southern gentlemen dare to extend the ban already inflicted on another group of “pure and virtuous citizens”—abolitionists—to women? It was almost tantamount to insulting their own presumably virtuous mothers!

Speaker of the House Polk ruled that Adams had a right to describe the contents of the petition. When the ex-president proceeded to read almost every word of the lengthy document, he was ordered to sit down. He did so, still reading in a defiant, declamatory voice.
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On another day, Adams asked the speaker if he could present a petition from nine ladies of Fredericksburg, Virginia, who seemed to be protesting the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The congressman said he was not sure whether the petitioners were slaves or free mulattoes. The petition was not clearly worded. But it was encouraging to see women engaging in such a worthy cause. This move sent Southern tempers soaring to volcanic proportions.

A South Carolina congressman called for indicting Adams for encouraging slaves to revolt. An Alabamian demanded a vote of censure. A Virginian reproached Adams for consorting with mulattoes, who by virtual definition were not respectable women. A New York Democrat tried sarcasm, urging his fellow members to be gentle with this old gentleman, who obviously did not have full command of his faculties. Otherwise how could he disturb the decorum of the House with such a ridiculous petition?

Adams finally got a chance to reply. He pointed out that he had only asked the speaker for permission to submit the petition. He had been as polite and respectful as possible. Why couldn't these critical gentlemen reply in the same decorous fashion? Moreover, he was not at all sure what these female slaves—or free mulattoes—were saying. After further discussion it became apparent that the petition was
against
the abolition of the slave trade. Someone had sent it to Adams as a hoax, hoping to embarrass him. But he had turned the joke against the jokers, with devastating results.

Adams proceeded to make a speech that lashed the Southerners like an overseer's whip. He said he was amazed that they would object to the mere idea of a petition from slaves. The most odious tyrants in the history of the human race had felt obligated to hear petitions from “the poorest of the meanest of human creatures.”