John Quincy Adams Goes To Congress

On November of 1830, John Quincy Adams won the elections to be the representative of Massachusetts's Plymouth District in Congress, receiving 1,817 votes to his nearest rival's 373 votes. This 64 year old freshman Congressman was no ordinary freshman. John Quincy Adams was the son of John and Abigail Adams, and he had served as the minister to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia and England; negotiated the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812; served as a U.S. Senator and Secretary of State; and was President of the United States from 1824 to 1828. When the people of the Plymouth District had asked John Quincy Adams to represent their district, Adams expected his time in office to be a relatively quiet and brief service. Instead, Adams would serve for 17 years in the House of Representatives, and he would become the Congress's most influential and outspoken critic of slavery, as well as a critic of the government's policies for the removal of eastern Indian tribes, a defender of the right of women to petition for political rights, and a critic of the war to obtain land from Mexico. Until a few years ago, I didn't know very much about John Quincy Adams, but the movie Amistad and two wonderful books, Arguing About Slavery by William Lee Miller and Mr. Adams's Last Crusade by Joseph Wheelan, helped me to learn more about this extraordinary American and his time as a U.S. Congressman.

When Adams had been elected to the House, it was only a few years before his single term in the Presidency had ended. It was considered a failed Presidency, as Adams constantly fought his political foes, John Calhoun, Henry Clay and especially Andrew Jackson. Adams took pains to learn the rules and procedures of the House of Representatives and became expert at using legislative procedures to push for caused he strongly believed in. Adams, though, had thought that his term of office in the House would be uneventful. In 1835, however, Representative Adams got into a fight with Southern legislators over the Gag Rule that started Adams on the road to being a strong advocate of abolition.

The Gag Rule was a procedure set up by Southern Congressmen to dispense with the reading of anti-slavery petitions that were being sent by abolitionists and that those petitions would be tabled. The aim of this was to suppress any debate on slavery in the House of Representatives. At this time the abolitionist movement was beginning to grow in the northern states, lead by groups like the American Anti-Slavery Society and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper The Liberator. At first, these abolitionists tried to mail to the South anti-slavery literature, but Postmaster General Amos Kendall allowed postal officials to block abolitionist mailings from reaching the Southern states. After this failed, abolitionists, many of them women volunteers, gathered signatures for petitions and forwarded them to sympathetic Northern congressmen to be introduced to the House. During the Congress's 1834-1835 session, petitions with 34,000 names were submitted. The next session, 150,000 signatures were submitted.

At first, Adams limited his fight against the gag rule as a fight for the constitutional right for citizens to petition and for the freedom of speech. He would say:

"The right of petition... is essential to the very existence of government; it is the right of the people over the Government; it is their right, and they may not be deprived of it."

As debate dragged on, however, Adams began to more frequently attack the institution of slavery itself. In 1836, the largest number of abolitionist petitions were being sent to John Quincy Adams to be read. He focused on the spread of slavery into new territories and fought against the annexation of Texas into the Union because of the possibility of adding a slave state to the Union and strengthening the slave states' power in Congress. Adams believed that the U.S. Constitution had a fatal flaw in Article I, Section 2, which counted a slave as three-fifths a human being, which rigged the census and gave the South parity with the North in Congress. Since the South voted as a bloc, they were able to impress their interests upon the nation as a whole. The South was thus able to suppress debate on slavery in Congress, they were able to stop abolitionist literature from entering the South, they were able to suspend habeas corpus for runaway slaves, and they were able to imprison free black sailors in the South. Adams believed this led to a situation where the United States was not functioning as either a democracy or a republic, but as a government of 300,000 slaveholders. Adams' outspokenness in fighting the gag rule and criticizing slavery helped convert many to the abolitionist cause and it led many abolitionists and progressives like Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah and Angelina Grinke, Benjamin Lundy and Lewis Tappan to admire Adams.

Though Adams was against slavery, he initially held different views from his abolitionist friends about how to abolish slavery. While most abolitionists wanted immediate emancipation of the slaves, Adams initially favored a gradual abolition plan, similar to emancipation plans that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had tried unsuccessfully to implement in the late 18th century. Adams introduced 3 constitutional amendments in the House: one would declare all children born in the United States on and after July 4, 1842 would be free; another would prohibit the admission of any new state, except Florida, whose Constitution tolerated slavery; and the third abolished slavery in the District of Columbia effective July 4, 1845. Adams's amendments did not pass, and the continued intransigence of the Southern legislators made Adams more pessimistic about the likelihood of any sort of gradual abolition plan. In his later years, Adams felt that only a civil war would be able to abolish the slavery system in the United States. In a House debate against Alabama Congressman james Dellet, Congressman Adams predicted that the price of the emancipation of the slaves would be war:

"I say now, let it come... Though it cost the blood of millions of white men, let it come. Let justice be done though the heavens fall."

Adams's evolution his views of slavery is described aptly by Joseph Wheelan in his book Mr. Adams's Last Crusade:

"Adams had demonstrated a rare willingness for someone of his years to challenge his own assumptions and fixed opinions about slavery and then to make a last, great ideological leap to an abolition position. It had been a long journey spanning decades- one that began in obliviousness and then progressed to a dawning awareness of the implications of the 1820 Missouri Compromise; thence to a moral revulsion tempered by fears that pushing too hard for abolition might shatter the Union; and finally, to a conviction that civil war was inevitable, with the alternative being a surrender of constitutional liberties to the South. Not only had Adams's beliefs evolved on slavery, but the evolution had occurred despite overwhelming opposition from colleagues in Congress and under the all-seeing eye of public opinion. Some credit surely was due Adams's abolitionist collaborators- Theodore Weld, Joshua Leavitt, Joshua Giddings, and Lewis Tappan- for arousing his moral objections to slavery to such a pitch that they vanquished his fear of upsetting the tense equipoise between North and South. But it was Adams who took the risks by choosing to steer by his moral principles."

Quite by accident, John Quincy Adams found himself to be the preeminent defender of human rights in the Congress. His strong belief in the principles of the Founding Fathers led Adams down a more radical road. Joseph Wheelan wrote about this:

"Adams had become the de facto chief spokesman for manyof those denied a voice in government- abolitionists silenced by the Gag Rule, slaves, Indians, and finally, women. One may ask why Adams took this role, but a better question is, Why did he have no company? Almost alone among his fellow congressmen, all a generation his junior or more, Adams believed in and upheld the principles of the Founding Fathers, embodied in the individual liberties of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, in the soaring words of the Declaration of Independence, and in the antiquated ethic, which went by the board with his father's defeat in 1800, of nonpartisanship and selfless public service.

Adams's colleagues were men of a different era, who regarded these principles as quaint. Products of the second American political system, they operated within the narrow parameters of constituencies, political parties, and economic interests.

Even decades earlier, Adams had been a rarity in the Senate and White House because of his conviction that he represented all of his constituents, not just those who voted for him. But now, in the politically charged Antebellum Age, he was truly a singularity. As the last serving 'son of the Revolution' and the last 'man of the whole country', John Quincy Adams fiercely and dutifully defended the rights of those needing a champion in the halls of Congress."

Before Adams became President, he believed that the United States was entitled to the land of the Native Americans. When Adams became President, however, John Quincy Adams changed his mind when he saw how unfairly the Creek Nation and the Choctaws were cheated out of their lands in Georgia. As Congressman, Adams spoke out on the responsibility of the federal government to protect the Native Americans rights. He presented a petition by two Seneca chiefs, Dartmouth educated Chief Pierce and Chief Two Guns, to ask Congress not to appropriate funds to drive their tribe west of the Mississippi. After meeting with Cherokee Chief John Ross, Congressman Adams introduced petitions protesting the mistreatment of Cherokees. Adams inability to help the Native Americans plight led him to quit the chairmanship of the Committee on Indian Affairs, saying he quit to turn "my eyes away from this sickening mass of putrefaction."

When Congressman Benjamin Howard of Maryland proposed to limit the right of women to petition, since most of the abolition petitions were collected by women, Congressman Adams fought back. Adams declared, "Are women to have no opinions or action on subjects relating to the general welfare?" He gave the example of several women in history who have participated in politics, from the prophetess Miriam in the Bible, to Queen Elizabeth, Catherine of Russia, Isabella of Castile, and the women who helped resist the British in the American Revolution, including his own mother Abigail Adams. Abigail Adams was an extraordinary woman and her intellect and strength played a strong part in John Quincy Adams's respect for women. William Lee Miller wrote in Arguing About Slavery:

"John Quincy had not one but two extraordinary parents, and the relationship between the two of them was extraordinary as well, as the world has learned from their letters. John Adams and the others among the greatest American founders- Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Franklin- would each reveal on paper a mind of distinction, and a worthy devotion to the republican cause, as the lengthening shelves of the volumes of the papers of each of them attest. But Adams, uniquely, had a moral companion and intellectual equal at home, a dearest friend who shared to the full those characteristics- intellectual distinction and moral commitment to republicanism- with some added sparks of her own. There is no equivalent to Abigail Adams in the households of the other great American founders. And fortunately for the country and the world, she revealed her distinction and her devotion to republican government, all unself-consciously, in 'papers' of her own. When you read those letters, to her husband first of all but to other people as well, you come to realize what an extraordinary person she was, and you may then infer what an extraordinary upbringing John Quincy had."

One of the high points in Congressman John Quincy Adams later life was his defense of the mutineer slaves of the Cuban ship Amistad in the Supreme Court in 1840. A group of Africans had been kidnapped from Sierra Leone by Spanish traders and were being transported to Cuba, in violation of Spain's law that forbade the importation of African slaves into all Spanish territories. The Spanish authorities tried to argue that the mutineers in the Amistad were slaves from Cuba and that the American government must return the mutineers under the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1795. Lewis Tappan, a prominent abolitionist and philanthropist, asked Adams to be a part of the legal team to argue the mutineers' case in the Supreme Court. Roger Baldwin, the Africans' Conneticut lawyer, argued the case's legal points. Adams would argue for four and a half hours on the first day and four hours when the court reconvened of the moral underpinnings of the case. Adams argued that the Africans were free men by Spain's own laws and that they had a legal right to fight for their freedom from the outlawed slave trade. He cited the Declaration of Independence and it's concepts of personal liberty. On March 9, Justice Joseph Story read the decision of the Supreme Court that the Africans would be set free.

Every year since the Gag Rule was first enacted, Congressman Adams would start the sessions of Congress with a request to his colleagues to repeal the Gag Rule and to restore the absolute right of petition. Finally, on December 3, 1844, the House voted 108-80 to abolish the Gag Rule. This allowed debate on the issue of slavery to finally take place in the Congress.

Reading these two books gave me a greater appreciation of John Quincy Adams and he has become a new hero for me. Like all great heroes, Adams had the capacity to grow over time as he became more exposed to the injustices that slaves, Native Americans and women faced in the America of the 1800s. His abiding faith in the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights led him to champion their causes, and it led him to more radical ways of thinking. He has had one of the most astonishing careers of any ex President that I know of. I think the only person with a similar career after his Presidency is Jimmy Carter. Both John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter were considered failed Presidents. I remember as a kid not liking the Carter Presidency: during the Democratic primaries I was hoping Ted Kennedy would win; and during the general elections I was hoping for John Anderson. But in the years after his Presidency I've grown to admire Carter's work with Habit for Humanity and his efforts for peace in the world stage and with his organization The Carter Center.

Adams was a great Congressman, but he would not have championed the causes of human rights without the initial agitation of grassroots abolitionist agitation in the form of petitions to Congress. This exposed Adams to the injustices of slavery, and his subsequent meetings with abolitionists, Native American chiefs, and women activists led him to enlarge his empathy for oppressed groups. William Lee Miller's book has had a great influenced in shaping my philosophy on how social change happens in the United States. I've come to believe that social change comes from the concurrence of grassroots agitation by radical activists pressing for change outside the political system and reform minded politicians working for change inside the system. Most of the Founding Fathers were against slavery, but the efforts of leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to abolish slavery were hampered by the lack of a strong enough grassroots movement to apply pressure to the government. Forty years later, John Quincy Adams benefitted in his fight against the Gag Rule from the work of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrision, Sarah and Angelina Grinke, Benjamin Lundy and Lewis Tappan to change people's opinions about slavery. Their work emboldened Adams to speak out more forcefully against slavery. William Lee Miller wrote in the epilogue of his book Arguing About Slavery a long description on how the slaves, abolitionists and reform politicians influenced each other to fight slavery:

"After all is said, the greatest credit for producing this national achievement should be granted to those who intended it. Surely there is something perverse in arguing otherwise.

The giant multitude of four million black Americans, radically shut out of the political process that has been the focus of this book, nevertheless must have been a powerful silent presence with effects that we cannot begin to measure... we may infer many effects of the presence of slaves and ex-slaves and free black persons upon the attitudes of the citizens who could take an active part in the politics of these events. The program of 'colonizing' freed African-Americans, which might have sounded plausible and acceptable in a superficial all-white setting, would be shown by any serious encounter with black Americans to be ridiculous, demeaning, and unjust. And the rejection of the program by some vocal and energetic white Americans would be a decisive turn in American history. Garrison would learn to reject the specious appeal of colonizing by his association with free blacks in Baltimore; Weld ould have his immediatism confirmed by living with black Americans in Cincinnati and in New York.... The role of black abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and others, has been outside our story and mostly outside out time period, but in the larger story, by the Civil War they would have become peculiarly potent participants in the argument of a putatively free society. And in the war itself there would come the immense human fact of the slaves of the South crashing through the lines of the Union forces, presenting themselves as an unavoidable reality, the ironical 'contraband' of this war, expecting freedom.

Among the white Americans to whom active politics was then confined, one must list two groups, and not just one, and add the moral stuff, fragile and limited and perhaps small but still real, in the broader American population that gave their work a certain resonance.

The first to be listed are those folk at the Adelphi and Lane Seminary in the 1830s and after- the immediatists, together with all those matrons, daughters, farmers, clerks, woodchoppers, shopkeepers, and mechanics whom they persuaded to sign petitions. They were a necessary but not a sufficient moral agency for ending of slavery in America. They brought forward a worthy strain in American culture. For slavery to be ended there had to be some individual human beings who did what they did. However complicated we want to make our historical reflections on what did happen, in the event, thereafter, we should not lose sight of this thread: there were some people- a very small number, on the margin of society, condemned and harassed- who nevertheless made it the first order of their life's business to oppose American slavery, and to insist that it was a grotesque evill that should be eliminated, and that in a little over thirty years, it was.

But another group, harder to romanticize, was also essential to that result. These are the politicians, discussed in the previous chapter, who operated in the great main arena of politics, and amid complexities had as a primary purpose opposition to slavery for reasons of its radical injustice. Their work comes mostly in the years beyond the reach of this story, but they, too, are a key to the ending of slavery.

These politicians depended upon their predecessors, the evangelistic abolitionists, for the pressure, for the agenda-setting, for the raised consciousness that made their work possible; but the abolitionists depended in their turn on these politicians, to gear their affirmations into the machinery of the real world. Both were necessary to bring about the total result, putting the elements together- ending slavery within an enhanced constitutional Union. John Quincy Adams at the end of his life was both an agent of those abolitionists and a harbinger of those politicians."