was read in Congress, Mr. Adams recorded this opinion of it:

"The message of the President gives great dissatisfaction to all those with whom I converse, and will be received with rapture by his partisans. He has cast away all neutrality which he had heretofore maintained upon the conflicting interests and opinions of the different sections of the country, and surrenders the whole Union to the nullifiers of the South and the landrobbers of the West."

Although Mr. Adams looked upon the prospects of the Union at this time with serious forebodings, and with most of the public men of the day, seemed to think there was no remedy or power against disunion, he strongly favored those measures which tended to establish the national authority; supported the act enforcing the collection of the revenue; as well as all measures looking to the general advancement and improvement of the country. General Jackson's proclamation against nullification temporarily revived his hopes; he now opposed all concessions to South Carolina while she continued her hostility to the authority of the General Government; and was in favor of compelling her submission by force, an extremity he had, perhaps, never contemplated except in his own dealings with the rude, foolish, and unpatriotic Governor of Georgia, a few years before. His feelings were intensely aroused, and he desired the question of nullification and secession to be settled forever at that time. With all the President's bluster, Mr. Adams soon discovered that the world had given him credit for more than he deserved, that his sympathies were with the nullifiers.

He opposed Mr. Clay's compromise measure and

looked with dread and disgust upon the turn, at last, taken by the Administration and in Congress, yielding to the false State rights issue set up, and fostering the spirit of nullification and anarchy. His opposition to the course of President Jackson henceforward was decided and persistent, and from this position he saw little opportunity for deviation. Still from this stiff stand he did depart in a few instances, and especially did he come to Jackson's relief at a moment when he most needed help, as he had done years before, in the French spoliation claims. Five millions of dollars had been provided for in favor of the United States by treaty, but France showed no disposition to liquidate the debt. General Jackson, enraged at the conduct of the French authorities and disgusted with asking for payment, at last signified his intention to have the money, or fight for it. But Jackson's belligerent mood frightened many of his timid friends, and his appeal to Congress seemed destined to fall far short of its purpose.

Mr. Adams believing Jackson right appeared in a speech in defense of his policy. In this speech he opposed the idea of further attempts at negotiation and persuasion, appealed to the warlike and chivalrous record of his countrymen, and boldly declared that Congress ought to support the President in his assertion that he should only reopen negotiations with France at the cannon's mouth. This speech brought general applause from the House, and turned the tide overwhelmingly in support of the President. The result was more than the most sanguine hoped for; the French authorities concluding it impolitic to risk a war on such a stake, took steps to settle the American claim.

This timely support brought no kindly recognition from General Jackson. Nor did Mr. Adams expect anything of the sort. He had supported the Presi dent's policy in this case because he believed it right and best for the country, and there is no foundation for the statement that his opposition to the Administration was not based upon the same ground. That he considered General Jackson wholly unqualified for the office he held, thought himself greatly injured by Jackson's conduct, and despised his ignorance and monstrous pretensions, there is no doubt, but that he allowed his opinions and feelings on this matter to warp his judgment or change his acts when his country was in question can not be sustained, and is sufficiently disproved by his course in this controversy with France.

Mr. Adams seldom, or never, perhaps, became so much of a politician, or so little of a statesman as to shape his acts by his personal feelings. If he was wrong in his defense and support of the Bank of the United States, he was sincere in his convictions of right. In his minority report, signed by himself and one other, he denied every charge made against the Bank, and earnestly considered General Jackson's' war upon it as one of the crimes to which his ignorance and other numerous disqualifications laid him liable.

In a speech in the House on the 25th of May, 1836, on some resolutions providing for distributions from the public stores to citizens of Georgia and Alabama who had suffered from Indian depredations, Mr. Adams said of this matter:

"Georgia, sir, Georgia, by trampling upon the faith of our national treaties with the Indian tribes, and by subjecting them

to her State laws, first set the example of that policy which is now in the process of consummation by this Indian war. In setting this example she bade defiance to the authority of the Government of this Nation. She nullified your laws; she set at naught your Executive and judicial guardians of the common Constitution of the land. To what extent she carried this policy, the dungeons of her prisons, and the records of the Supreme Judicial Court of the United States, can tell.

"To those prisons she committed inoffensive, innocent, pious ministers of the Gospel of truth, for carrying the light, the comforts, the consolations of that Gospel, to the hearts and minds of those unhappy Indians. A solemn decision of the Supreme Court of the United States pronounced that act a violation of your treaties and your laws. Georgia defied that decision. Your Executive Government never carried it into execution. The imprisoned missionaries of the Gospel were compelled to purchase their ransom from perpetual captivity by sacrificing their rights as freemen to the meekness of their principles as Christians; and you have sanctioned all these outrages upon justice, law, and humanity, by succumbing to the power and the policy of Georgia; by accommodating your legislation to her arbitrary will; by tearing to tatters your old treaties with the Indians, and by constraining them, under peine forte et dure, to the mockery of signing other treaties with you, which, at the first moment when it shall suit your purpose, you will again tear to tatters, and scatter to the four winds of heaven; till the Indian race shall be extinct upon this Continent, and it shall become a problem, beyond the solution of antiquaries and historical societies, what the red man of the forest was.

"This, sir, is the remote and primitive cause of the present Indian war, your own injustice sanctioning and sustaining that of Georgia and Alabama. This system of policy was first introduced by the present Administration of your National Government. It is directly the reverse of that system which had been pursued by all the preceding Administrations of this Government under the present Constitution. That system consisted in the most anxious and persevering efforts to civilize the Indians, to attach them to the soil upon which they lived, to enlighten their minds, to soften and humanize their hearts, to fix in permanency their habitations, and to turn them from the wandering and precarious pursuits of the hunter to the tillage of the ground, to the

cultivation of corn and cotton, to the comforts of the fireside, to the delights of home. This was the system of Washington and of Jefferson, steadily pursued by all their successors, and to which all your treaties and all your laws of intercourse with the Indian tribes were accommodated. The whole system is now broken up, and instead of it you have adopted that of expelling, by force or by compact, all the Indian tribes from their own territories and dwellings to a region beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Missouri, beyond the Arkansas, bordering upon Mexico; and there you have deluded them with the hope that they will find a permanent abode, a final resting-place from your never-ending rapacity and persecution. There you have undertaken to lead the willing, and drive the reluctant, by fraud or by force, by treaty or by the sword and the rifle, all the remnants of the Seminoles, the Creeks, of the Cherokees and the Choctaws, and of how many other tribes I can not now stop to enumerate."

In the fall of 1837 Mr. Adams made his famous speech called "Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs, and Adverbs." This speech was brought out and uttered on the moment, without preparation, by a remark from C. C. Cambreleng that at such a moment the House could not consume its time in caviling about the construction of a sentence to which Mr. Adams objected, or in discussing nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adverbs. Of this speech the "National Register"

said :-
:-

"Mr. Adams's speech upon nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adverbs, displays a degree of patient labor and research, which must convince both political friends and foes that neither time nor circumstances have impaired the strength or acuteness of his mind, or his zeal in behalf of what he deems to be the interests of the people. Familiar as we have been, for a series of years, with minute calculations and statistical details, the most powerful but least prized modes of exhibiting results, we have been surprised and delighted at the clearness and force with which every point is illustrated, and most warmly commend the speech to all who wish to understand the questions on which it treats."