|
on slavery |
1804: In setting up a government for the Louisiana Territory Congress
passed a bill to forbid the slave
trade (but not slavery) there. Freshman Senator JQA,
who felt the people of Louisiana had never asked
to be part of the United States and that therefore such a
government would be colonialism, voted
against the bill. “Slavery in a moral sense is
an evil; but as connected with commerce it has important uses. The
regulations offered to prevent slavery are insufficient.
I shall therefore vote against them.” (Hecht, 152.)
1804: Adams claimed that the clause in the Constitution that
counted slaves as three-fifths of a free
person when calculating congressional representation created
a “privileged order of slave-holding Lords,
and a race of men degraded to a lower status, merely because
they were not slave-holders. Every planter south of
the Potomac has one vote for himself and three votes in effect
for every five slaves he keeps in bondage; while a
New England farmer, who contributes tenfold as much to the support
of the government, has only a single vote.”
(Hecht, p153-4.)
1815: As Ambassador to Great Britain at the end
of the War of 1812 JQA negotiated the return of
American property taken by the British – including slaves
captured by the army and others who sought
refuge with them. (Hecht, p259.)
1820: "Slavery is the great and foul stain upon
the North American Union... A dissolution, at least temporary, of
the Union, as now constituted, would now be certainly necessary...
The Union might then be reorganized on the
fundamental principle of emancipation." (Adams, p228-9)
1820: "If I were a member of the Legislature of
one of the free States, I would move for a declaratory act, that so
long as the article in the Constitution of Missouri depriving
the colored citizens of the State, say of Massachusetts,
of their rights as citizens of the United States within the
State of Missouri, should subsist, so long the white citizens
of the State of Missouri should be held as aliens within the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not entitled to claim
or enjoy within the same any right or privilege of a citizen
of the United States." (Adams, p246)
1826: JQA
wrote in a poem on the anniversary of his father’s death: “Who
but shall learn that
freedom is
the prize/ Man still is bound to rescue or maintain:/ The native’s God
commands the slave
to rise,/
And on the oppressor’s head to break his chain,/ Roll, years of promise,
rapidly roll around,/
Till not
a slave shall on this earth be found.” (Hecht, p152.)
1826: A
decade after leaving the presidency JQA explained why he hadn’t attempted
to get
Congress
to recognize the free Black government of Haiti: “A bare hint to Congress
of the
possibility…
would have suggested that negroes and mulattoes were not only human beings
but
capable of
constituting a sovereign state and if I had escaped impeachment there would
have been
a Resolution
carried…that featherless bipeds with wool for hair and their descendants
till bleached
into Anglo
Saxons are not entitled to the rights of man.” (Hecht p548)
1833: After leaving the presidency JQA became a congressman
(the only ex-president ever to do so).
Congress debated a tariff which would have protected the
manufacturers of the North and hurt the
farmers of the South. Congressman Clayton of Georgia
complained: “Our slaves are our machinery,
and we have as good a right to profit by them as do the northern
men who profit by the machinery they
employ.” In replying JQA referred to the
Constitutional clause that counted each slave as three-fifths
of a free person for calculating how many congresspersons
each state was entitled to): “Now those
Machines have twenty-odd Representatives in this Hall, Representatives
elected not by the machines, but by
those who own them… Have the manufacturers asked for representation
from their machines? Their looms and
factories have no vote in Congress… Everybody knows
that where this type of machinery (slaves) exists there is
liable to be more violence than elsewhere because the machinery
sometimes exerts self-moving power. Such a
case (Nat
Turner rebellion) has been exerted. Very recently…
“My constituents have as much right to say to
the people, ‘We will not submit to the protection of your interests
(by paying for a standing army)’ as the
people of the South have the right to address such language
as them.” (Hecht, 152.)
1833: "I believe that the spirit of the age and the course
of events is tending to universal emancipation. But bound
as I am by the Constitution of the United States, I am not at
liberty to take a part in promoting it. The remedy must
arise in the seat of the evil (the south)." (Falkner,
p 52)
1836: "Suppose a civil war. Suppose Congress
were called to raise armies, to supply money from the whole
Union, to suppress an insurrection, would they have no authority
to interfere with the institution of slavery?
...Can it for an instant be pretended that Congress, in such
a contingency, would have no authority to interfere with
the institution in any way? It would be equivalent to
say that Congress has no constitutional authority to make
peace. From that instant that your slaveholding states
becomes the theatre of war, civil, servile or foreign... the war
power of Congress extends to interference with the institution
of slavery." This argument was used by Lincoln
26 years later in making the Emancipation Proclamation.
(Falkner. p133-4 )
1836: "The was in Texas is a Mexican civil war,
and a war for the reestablishment of slavery where it was
abolished. It is a war between slavery and emancipation,
and every effort has been made to drive us into
the war on the side of slavery. Do not you, slaveholding
exterminators of Indians, from the bottoms of your souls,
hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian emancipator of slaves?
...And this is the nation with which, at the
instigation of your executive government, you are now rushing
into war – a war of conquest." (Falkner, p134.)
1837: Adams attempted to present to the House of Representatives
a petition from free Black women
of Virginia regarding slavery. A congressman described
the women as "infamous," meaning that they
were prostitutes. "If they are infamous women,
who was it that made them infamous? Not their own color but
their masters. ...in the South there exists great resemblance
between the progeny of the colored people and the
white men who claim possession of them. Thus, perhaps,
the charge of infamous might be retorted on those who
made it, as originating from themselves." (Falkner,
p163.)
1837: "(Abolition) is the most dangerous of all
subjects for public contention. In the South, it is a perpetual
agony of conscious guilt and terror attempting to disguise itself
under sophisticated argument and braggard
menaces. In the North, the people favor the whites and
fear the blacks. The politicians court the South because
they want their votes. The abolitionists... kindle the
opposition against themselves into a flame and the passions of
the populace are all engaged against them." (Falkner,
p175)
1838: Pro-slaver ministers are "prevaricating with
their own consciences, and taxing their learning and ingenuity
to prove that the Bible sanctions slavery... These preachers
of the Gospel might just as well call our extermination
of the Indians an obedience to Divine commands because Jehovah
commanded the children of Israel to
exterminate the Canaanitish nations." (Adams, p495)
1839: "I do believe slavery to be a sin before the sight of God." (Falkner, p197)
1839: Adams proposed his own solution to the slavery issue:
"1. From and after the 4th of July, 1842, there
shall be, throughout the United States, no hereditary slavery;
but on and after that day every child born within the
United States, their territories or jurisdiction, shall be born
free. 2. With the exception of the territory of Florida,
there shall henceforth never be admitted into this Union any
state, the constitution of which shall tolerate within the
same the existence of slavery. 3. From and after
the 4th of July, 1845, there shall be neither slavery nor slave
trade at the seat of the government of the United States (i.e.
Washington, D.C.)" As Adams expected, the
House never voted on these resolutions. (Falkner,
p198)
1839: “What then is the meaning of that immediate
abolition which the Anti-Slavery Society has made the test of
orthodoxy to their political church? A moral and physical
impossibility.” (Hecht, p564)
1841: In spite of ill health, advanced age, his duties as
a congressman, and the fact that he had not
practiced law in decades, JQA was asked to represent the
Amistad
prisoners before the Supreme
Court. He did so for no fee and won. "I know
of no law, except (the Declaration of Independence)... that
reaches the case of my clients but the Law of Nature and of
Nature's God on which our fathers placed our own
national existence." (Falkner p236)
1841: "What can I do for the cause of God and man,
for the progress of human emancipation, for the suppression
of the African slave-trade? Yet my conscience presses
me on; let me but die upon the breach." (Adams,
p519)
1842: JQA attempted to present to the House a petition
he received from Northern abolitionists calling
for the dissolution of the Union. Southern congressmen
branded the idea treason and attempted to
have him censured by the House. His defense went on
so long (and became so popular with the nation)
that the censure proposal was dropped. (Hecht p 591-6)
1842: "Threats of lynching and of assassination are the
natural offspring of slave-breeders and slave-traders...
Such dross the fire must purge." (Adams, p540)
previous president next president
Return
to home
page