John Quincy Adams: Diary Entries on the Missouri Question

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[January] 24.—I walked with R. M. Johnson to the Senate chamber and heard Mr. Pinkney close his Missouri speech. There was a great crowd of auditors. Many ladies, among whom several seated on the floor of the Senate. His eloquence was said to be less overpowering than it had been last Friday. His language is good, his fluency without interruption or hesitation, his manner impressive, but his argument weak, from the inherent weakness of his cause. After he closed, Mr. Otis declared his determination to speak to-morrow on the subject. The Senators went into executive conclave, and all strangers withdrew. I went into the hall of the House of Representatives, and heard debates there upon a specific appropriation bill, and upon a motion to postpone a bill authorizing the people of the Missouri Territory to form a State Constitution. There was some sharp debating, and the question was decided by yeas and nays; against postponement, eighty-eight to eighty-seven. . . .

[February] 4th. Mr. Sanford, one of the Senators from New York, was here. His colleague, Mr. R. King, came and passed a couple of hours with me at my office. He has been returned again to the Senate by the Legislature of New York in a manner which is unparalleled in this Union. The choice ought regularly to have been made this time last winter; but there were three parties in the Legislature, of which that in favor of Mr. King was the smallest. Governor Clinton’s influence was all exerted against him, and the Republican opposition to Clinton had a candidate of their own. When the next House of Assembly were chosen, last May, it turned out that the federalists had gained ground which Clinton’s party had lost. He therefore, to maintain himself, found it indispensably necessary to conciliate the federalists, and, besides appointing several of them to important offices in the State, he changed his policy towards Mr. King, to such a degree that in his speech to the New York Legislature he recommended King to their choice, not indeed by name, but designating him in terms not to be mistaken. The Republican opposition took also the same direction, and King, who, after ten trials last winter, could not get so many as twenty votes out of one hundred and fifty, now came in by a unanimous vote of the Senate, and by all but three in the House of Assembly. Shortly before the meeting of Congress, he published, at the request of a Missouri question meeting at New York, the substance of his two speeches last winter in the Senate on that bill, which was then lost by the disagreement between the two Houses on the restricting clause. This publication has largely contributed to kindle the flame now raging throughout the Union on that question, and which threatens its dissolution. King is strongly affected and agitated by it. Whether he sees the consequences in their full extent, and has made up his mind to promote them, even to the separation of the Union, I am not sure; but my own opinion is, that no man ought to take an active part in that discussion without being first prepared for that and reconciled to it, because it must end in that.

[February] 5. . . . After being half an hour in the Senate-chamber, where I found Brown, of Louisiana, and Gaillard were for taking Texas, I went into the hall of the House of Representatives, where they were in the heat of the Missouri debate. Daniel P. Cook was speaking in favor of the restriction, and was followed by Mr. Hemphill, of Philadelphia, on the same side. After he had spoken about an hour, and before he had finished, the House adjourned. Walking to my office, Mr. Henry Meigs, member of the House from New York, told me that he had offered this morning several resolutions, with a view to appropriate the proceeds of the public lands to the emancipation of the slaves throughout the Union. This, I suppose, is to serve him as an apology to his constituents for voting against the restriction. . . .

[February] 11.—I went up to the Capitol and heard Mr. King in the Senate, upon what is called the Missouri question. He had been speaking perhaps an hour before I went in, and I heard him about an hour. His manner is dignified, grave, earnest, but not rapid or vehement. There was nothing new in his argument, but he unravelled with ingenious and subtle analysis many of the sophistical tissues of the slave-holders. He laid down the position of the natural liberty of man, and its incompatibility with slavery in any shape. He also questioned the Constitutional right of the President and Senate to make the Louisiana Treaty; but he did not dwell upon those points, nor draw the consequences from them which I should think important in speaking to that subject. He spoke, however, with great power, and the great slave-holders in the House gnawed their lips and clenched their fists as they heard him.

The Senate adjourned to Monday immediately after he finished, and I went into the House of Representatives, where I found R. C. Anderson, of Kentucky, speaking upon the same subject, but on the other side of the question. He speaks with fluency, as do almost all the members of Congress. This facility is one of the greatest impediments to our legislation. In the British Parliament there are about ten or twelve Ministerial speakers, and as many on the opposition side, who perform almost all the debating part of deliberation. There are never more than two or three long speeches on each side, and the question is always taken before the House adjourns. Here, a single question is sometimes debated three weeks, and members make speeches three days long. . . .

We attended an evening party at Mr. Calhoun’s, and heard of nothing but the Missouri question and Mr. King’s speeches. The slave-holders cannot hear of them without being seized with cramps. They call them seditious and inflammatory, when their greatest real defect is their timidity. Never since human sentiments and human conduct were influenced by human speech was there a theme for eloquence like the free side of this question now before Congress of this Union. By what fatality does it happen that all the most eloquent orators of the body are on its slavish side? There is a great mass of cool judgment and plain sense on the side of freedom and humanity, but the ardent spirits and passions are on the side of oppression. Oh, if but one man could arise with a genius capable of comprehending, a heart capable of supporting, and an utterance capable of communicating those eternal truths that belong to this question, to lay bare in all its nakedness that outrage upon the goodness of God, human slavery, now is the time, and this is the occasion, upon which such a man would perform the duties of an angel upon earth!

[February] 13.—Attended the divine service at the Capitol, and heard Mr. Edward Everett, the Professor of the Greek language at Harvard University, a young man of shining talents and of illustrious promise. His text was from I Cor. vii. 29: “Brethren, the time is short,” and it was without comparison the most splendid composition as a sermon that I ever heard delivered. . . . Mr. Clay, with whom I walked, after the service, to call upon Chief-Justice Marshall, told me that although Everett had a fine fancy and a chaste style of composition, his manner was too theatrical, and he liked Mr. Holley’s manner better.

Clay started, however, immediately to the Missouri question, yet in debate before both Houses of Congress, and, alluding to a strange scene at Richmond, Virginia, last Wednesday evening, said it was a shocking thing to think of, but he had not a doubt that within five years from this time the Union would be divided into three distinct confederacies. I did not incline to discuss the subject with him. We found Judges Livingston and Story with the Chief Justice. I came home for a moment, after meeting successively, in the Avenue, John Sergeant and Ingersoll. Mr. Otis had invited me to go and dine with him at Crawford’s, in Georgetown, and I walked there. Mr. King, Judge Story, Mr. Everett, and Mr. Webster, of Boston, formed the party, with Mrs. Otis, who is in deep mourning for a daughter whom she has lost since she has now been here. The party was quite social, and the Missouri subject was very freely canvassed. King has made a desperate plunge into it, and has thrown his last stake upon the card. It agitates him accordingly with deep and vehement emotion. He has, however, great self-control, cool judgment, and spirit-breaking experience. There was difference enough of opinion between us to occasion much, though no angry, discussion. . . .

[February] 20th. I called and visited R. Peters, Junr.; Captain Biddle, Cadwallader, and Hopkinson were not at home. I met there General Bloomfield, who, with many others, is much alarmed at the dissensions which have arisen in the nation and in Congress from the Missouri or slave question. The Territory of Missouri is a part of the Louisiana cession. At the session of Congress before the last a bill was introduced for enabling its inhabitants to form a State Constitution. There was then not time to pass the bill, which was referred over, and brought forward again at the last session. When it was under debate at the second meeting in committee of the whole, an amendment was proposed by General James Tallmadge, seconded by John W. Taylor, both members from the State of New York, making one of the conditions of the admission of Missouri that the further introduction of slavery should be prohibited, and that slaves hereafter born there shall be free at the age of twenty-five. This amendment excited a very angry debate, but was adopted by theHouse, disagreed to by the Senate, and, each House adhering to its views, the bill was lost between them.

When the amendment was first presented, its importance and consequences were certainly foreseen by no one, not even by those who brought it forward. Its discussion disclosed a secret: it revealed the basis for a new organization of parties. Clay had been two years laboring, first upon South American patriotism and then upon the Seminole War, first in defiance of Crawford and then as a subaltern to him, to get up a new party. In both instances he had failed. But here was a new party ready formed, but of no pleasing aspect to either Clay or Crawford, terrible to the whole Union, but portentously terrible to the South—threatening in its progress the emancipation of all their slaves, threatening in its immediate effect that Southern domination which has swayed the Union for the last twenty years, and threatening that political ascendency of Virginia, upon which Clay and Crawford both had fastened their principal hopes of personal aggrandizement. The failure of the bill, and the attempt to exclude slavery from the future State of Missouri, produced great fermentation there and in the Southern States, but particularly in Virginia. North and East it excited less feeling, but Mr. King, who had taken a considerable part in the debate at the last session in Senate, in the course of the summer set on foot and organized a concert of measures which have resulted in the struggle which now shakes the Union to its centre. Bloomfield, though a member from New Jersey, took at the last session the Southern side of this question, and still adheres to it. But he says he received yesterday a letter from a very sober and respectable neighbor of his, who asks him whether a civil war would not be preferable to the extension of slavery beyond the Mississippi. This is a question between the rights of human nature and the Constitution of the United States. Probably both will suffer by the issue of the controversy.

[February] 23. A. Livermore and W. Plumer, Junr, members of the House of Representatives from New Hampshire, called upon me, and, conversing on the Missouri slave question, which at this time agitates Congress and the Nation, asked my opinion of the propriety of agreeing to a compromise. The division in Congress and the nation is nearly equal on both sides. The argument on the free side is, the moral and political duty of preventing the extension of slavery in the immense country from the Mississippi River to the South Sea. The argument on the slave side is, that Congress have no power by the Constitution to prohibit slavery in any State, and, the zealots say, not in any Territory. The proposed compromise is to admit Missouri, and hereafter Arkansas, as States, without any restriction upon them regarding slavery, but to prohibit the future introduction of slaves in all Territories of the United States north of 36º 30’ latitude. I told these gentlemen that my opinion was, the question could be settled no otherwise than by a compromise. The regulation, exclusion, or abolition of slavery in the system of our Union is among the powers reserved to the people of the several States by their separate Governments, though I have no doubt that Congress have Constitutional powers to prohibit any internal traffic in slaves between one State and another. In the States where slavery does not exist, neither Congress, nor the State Legislature, nor the people have any rightful power to establish it. For the admission into the Union of a State where no slavery exists, Congress may prescribe as a condition that slavery shall never be established in it, as they have done to the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; but where it exists, and where there are already slaves in great numbers, as in Missouri and Arkansas, the power of extirpating it is not given to Congress by the Constitution. To proscribe slavery, therefore, in Missouri or Arkansas, I believe to be impracticable. But if a provision can be obtained excluding the introduction of slaves into future Territories, it will be a great and important point secured. I apprehend, however, that Livermore and Plumer did not concur with me in my opinion.

[February] 24th. I had some conversation with Calhoun on the slave question pending in Congress. He said he did not think it would produce a dissolution of the Union, but, if it should, the South would be from necessity compelled to form an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Great Britain.

I said that would be returning to the colonial state.

He said, yes, pretty much, but it would be forced upon them. I asked him whether he thought, if by the effect of this alliance, offensive and defensive, the population of the North should be cut off from its natural outlet upon the ocean, it would fall back upon its rocks bound hand and foot, to starve, or whether it would not retain its powers of locomotion to move southward by land. Then, he said, they would find it necessary to make their communities all military. I pressed the conversation no further; but if the dissolution of the Union should result from the slave question, it is as obvious as anything that can be foreseen of futurity, that it must shortly afterwards be followed by the universal emancipation of the slaves. A more remote but perhaps not less certain consequence would be the extirpation of the African race on this continent, by the gradually bleaching process of intermixture, where the white portion is already so predominant, and by the destructive progress of emancipation, which, like all great religious and political reformations, is terrible in its means, though happy and glorious in its end. Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union, and it is a contemplation worthy of the most exalted soul whether its total abolition is or is not practicable: if practicable, by what means it may be effected, and if a choice of means be within the scope of the object, what means would accomplish it at the smallest cost of human sufferance. A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would be certainly necessary, and the dissolution must be upon a point involving the question of slavery, and no other. The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation. This object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue. A life devoted to it would be nobly spent or sacrificed. This conversation with Calhoun led me into a momentous train of reflection. It also engaged me so much that I detained him at his office, insensibly to myself, till near five o’clock, an hour at least later than his dining-time. . . .

[February] 27. Called upon Mr. R. King at his lodgings at Crawford’s Hotel, Georgetown. Found him still absorbed in the Missouri slave question, upon which he has been the great champion of freedom and the Northern interest. The partisans of slavery have spread abroad the idea that he has been actuated in this affair by motives of personal ambition—that he is making an effort to get up a new division of parties and to put himself at the head of half the Union, despairing of ever being able to obtain the highest powers and honors of the whole. It is not easy to account for the course that King has pursued throughout this affair without allowing something for the instigations of personal expectancy. . . . He reckons more upon the apparent ardor of the popular sentiment against slavery to the North than it is worth. The question to the North and to the free States is merely speculative. The people do not feel it in their persons or in their purses. On the slave side it comes home to the feelings and interests of every man in the community. Hence, if this question is ultimately decided, as it will be, in favor of slavery in Missouri, the people in the free States will immediately acquiesce, and it will be impossible to keep the controversy alive. . . .

[March] 2. The compromise of the slave question was this day completed in Congress. The Senate have carried their whole point, barely consenting to the formality of separating the bill for the admission of the State of Maine into the Union from that for authorizing the people of the Territory of Missouri to form a State Government. The condition that slavery should be prohibited by their Constitution, which the House of Representatives had inserted, they have abandoned. Missouri and Arkansas will be slave States, but to the Missouri bill a section is annexed, prohibiting slavery in the remaining part of the Louisiana cession north of latitude 36º 30’. This compromise, as it is called, was finally carried this evening by a vote of ninety to eighty-seven in the House of Representatives, after successive days and almost nights of stormy debate.

[March] 3. . . . And so it is that a law for perpetuating slavery in Missouri, and perhaps in North America, has been smuggled through both Houses of Congress. I have been convinced from the first starting of this question that it could not end otherwise. The fault is in the Constitution of the United States, which has sanctioned a dishonorable compromise with slavery. There is henceforth no remedy for it but a new organization of the Union, to effect which a concert of all the white States is indispensable. Whether that can ever be accomplished is doubtful. It is a contemplation not very creditable to human nature that the cement of common interest produced by slavery is stronger and more solid than that of unmingled freedom. In this instance the slave States have clung together in one unbroken phalanx, and have been victorious by the means of accomplices and deserters from the ranks of freedom. Time only can show whether the contest may ever be with equal advantage renewed. But so polluted are all the streams of legislation in regions of slavery, that this bill has been obtained only by two as unprincipled artifices as dishonesty ever devised: one, by coupling it as an appendage to the bill for admitting Maine; and the other, by this outrage perpetrated by the Speaker upon the rules of the House.

When I came this day to my office, I found there a note requesting me to call at one o’clock at the President’s house. It was then one, and I immediately went over. He expected that the two bills, for the admission of Maine, and to enable Missouri to make a Constitution, would have been brought to him for his signature, and he had summoned all the members of the Administration to ask their opinions in writing, to be deposited in the Department of State, upon two questions: 1, Whether Congress had a Constitutional right to prohibit slavery in a Territory: and 2, Whether the eighth section of the Missouri bill (which interdicts slavery forever in the Territory north of thirty-six and a half latitude) was applicable only to the Territorial State, or could extend to it after it should become a State.

As to the first question, it was unanimously agreed that Congress have the power to prohibit slavery in the Territories. . . .  I had no doubt of the right of Congress to interdict slavery in the Territories, and urged that the power contained in the term “dispose of” included the authority to do everything that could be done with it as mere property, and that the additional words, authorizing needful rules and regulations respecting it, must have reference to persons connected with it, or could have no meaning at all. As to the force of the term needful, I observed, it was relative, and must always be supposed to have reference to some end. Needful to what end? Needful in the Constitution of the United States to any of the ends for which that compact was formed. Those ends are declared in its preamble: to establish justice, for example. What can be more needful for the establishment of justice than the interdiction of slavery where it does not exist?

As to the second question, my opinion was that the interdiction of slavery in the eighth section of the bill forever would apply and be binding upon the State as well as the Territory, because, by its interdiction in the Territory, the people, when they come to form a Constitution, would have no right to sanction slavery. . . .

After this meeting, I walked home with Calhoun, who said that the principles which I had avowed were just and noble: but that in the Southern country, whenever they were mentioned, they were always understood as applying only to white men. Domestic labor was confined to the blacks, and such was the prejudice, that if he, who was the most popular man in his district, were to keep a white servant in his house, his character and reputation would be irretrievably ruined.

I said that this confounding of the ideas of servitude and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery: but he thought it attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all kinds of labor—not, for example, to farming. He himself had often held the plough: so had his father. Manufacturing and mechanical labor was not degrading. It was only manual labor—the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. And it was the best guarantee to equality among the whites. It produced an unvarying level among them. It not only did not excite, but did not even admit of inequalities, by which one white man could domineer over another.

I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light. It is, in truth, all perverted sentiment—mistaking labor for slavery and dominion for freedom. The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee’s manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? . . . I have favored this Missouri compromise, believing it to be all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as a bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should have terminated in a convention of the States to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect, namely, that of rallying to their standard the other States by the universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break. For the present, however, this contest it laid asleep.

 

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Source: Charles Francis Adams, ed. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Vols. 4–5. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1875.