Adams's views as to slavery, at this point a brief state.. ment becomes necessary. With his father and most

New England Federalists he had always been unfriendly to slavery. He had from boyhood detested the "institution," and he was never able to discover in it anything appealing to his moral or manly principles, or his sense of justice, or his love of country. With the eye of a statesman he had looked upon slavery as an evil which might, under Providence, in some way be removed as an element of destruction to the Republic. Yet political anti-slavery had been a matter of gradual development with him, and even in 1831, he lacked very much of being an Abolitionist in the sense usually employed.

This he never was, indeed. He had no sympathy with unlawful and irregular advances against slavery, and did not believe that the petitions he first presented to Congress should receive more than a respectful notice from that body. The slave-trade in the District of Columbia he believed Congress should suppress, while it had not power to abolish the "institution" there, as, in truth, it had no Constitutional authority for suppressing the trade, or for calling it piracy on the high seas, when tolerated, in revolting forms, in sight of the National Capital.

During his Presidency and the earlier periods of his public career, Mr. Adams had been sufficiently conservative" on the subject of slavery' to excite little or no ill-will from its friends and supporters. Yet he had never withheld his opinions, and they were of that high and conscientious character which demanded the respect of Mr. Calhoun and the few who had occasion to know them.

The Missouri Compromise struggle from 1818 to 1821 had greatly disturbed Mr. Adams, as it had the older generation of patriots, men with whom he stood closely related. But the spirit of compromise had prevailed, and the question was not sufficiently developed. for hopeful agitation. And when Mr. Adams entered Congress in 1831 he still did not think the time had arrived for pressing this matter, which he believed would, before long, become the great pivotal question in American politics. His course as the champion of the right of petition gave him a distinction as an enemy of slavery, which he neither desired nor deserved at the time.

Up to 1835, or the introduction of the scheme to annex Texas, he had been the instrument of bringing before the House the numerous petitions on the subject of slavery because he believed in the right of the people to petition, and the duty of Congress to hear them. Although he saw, in the course of a few years, that the conflict between freedom and slavery could not be much further deferred, he still had no desire to enter the field against slavery. He hoped other men would appear for the occasion who were better able to bear the shock of the first combats. But his generally admitted championship of the right of petition, in time drifted him to the head of the opponents of slavery in Congress. What he meant as just to the people the friends of slavery assumed as premeditated and 'determined hostility to them. And thus, from one side or the other, he was goaded into a position he really hoped he would not be obliged to take.

The little he did, however, before 1835, gave Edward Everett ground for saying of him: "Had he

retired from Congress at that time it would have been, perhaps, rather with a reputation brought to the House, than achieved on the floor; a reputation enough to fill the ambition of a common man,' nay, of a very uncommon one; but it would probably have been thought that, surpassing most others, he had hardly equaled himself." Still Mr. Everett bears testimony to his having been "a firm and efficient champion of the Bank of the United States, then subsisting under a charter of Congress, and, up to that time, conducted, as he thought, with integrity. On these, and all the other topics of the day, he took an active part, employing himself with assiduity in the committeeroom, preparing elaborate reports, and occasionally, though not frequently, pouring out the affluence of his mind in debate."

Mr. Adams's family opposed his becoming embroiled in the slavery warfare on account of his age and the evil consequences which would, from it, gather around his declining years, when he should have expected quiet and peace. The Abolitionists, whose plans and acts he did not approve, pressed him forward, and the friends of slavery goaded him on. But while he never would have taken the lead in Congress against slavery and the political errors of its advocates, if a champion of similar views had appeared to fill his place, nothing could induce him to turn back or abandon a cause he knew to be right.

He believed slavery would eventually destroy the Union if it were not itself robbed of its power over the Government, and put in the way of extinction. With this view he associated the natural aversion he held for the "institution," and his earnest belief in its

great wrong, and on these things his course was based. Age was no obstacle to him. He ignored his former struggles and their accompanying evils, and chivalrously entered the contest which he felt to be inevitable, and before which his former deeds shrank into small proportions. And here again the thread may, in a manner, be taken up in the career of this most statesman-like, stubborn, and powerful of the earlier foes of human slavery.

However, before resuming the history of the slavery contest, so far as Mr. Adams was connected with it, it may be of some moment to present a brief sketch of the fate of former petitions to Congress, and the growth of the sentiment against slavery in the country at the time.

From 1620, the year in which the first slaves were landed in America, to the War of the Revolution, the British Government fostered the slave-trade, and did all it could to spread and establish slavery throughout its American Colonies. But the avaricious course of the government was by no means unanimously approved either at home or on this side of the ocean. The Quakers as a class, and many of the Christian Reformers, Presbyterians and other nonconformers to the Church of England, especially the Methodists, soon began to raise their voice against what they believed to be a heinous crime against God and man. All the Colonies were involved in the traffic, and more or less participators in the perpetuation of this crime against nature; and in all of them there were many earnest, thoughtful men who felt great anxiety about the progress of slavery, and some in all parts of the country who bitterly opposed it. Nevertheless, there

was a sort of moral or immoral apathy on the subject, and a considerable degree of uncertainty seemed to hang over the colonists as to the course they should take. As late as 1716, even the New England Quakers asked in one of their meetings "whether it be agreeable to truth for Friends to purchase slaves and keep them for a term of years?"

This important query they were able to settle in the negative not long subsequently. From this they soon reached the conclusion that what it was not right for them to do for a term of years they had no right to do for a day, or at all. Elihu Coleman wrote in a pamphlet that making slaves of men was anti-Christian and very directly opposed to both " grace and nature." The Wesleys and others in England now happened to see that slavery was a great evil, and everywhere eloquent tongues were heard in its reprobation.

In 1773, the distinguished Dr. Benjamin Rush published an address to the people of the American Colonies in opposition to slavery, and in it took the advanced and noble position that "no manufactory can ever be of consequence enough to society to admit the least violation of the laws of justice or humanity." A grand, lofty maxim for all ages, and all the schemes and pursuits of men! Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Randolph, and many others in the South were little behind the more calm and conscientious thinkers at the northern end of the country. Some of the bitterest opponents of slavery were found in the Southern Colonies. Under Governor James Oglethorpe, who regarded slavery as among the vilest of sins, Georgia held out for some time against the