John Quincy Adams: Address to Constituents at Braintree

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Congressional reapportionment affected a significant portion of Adams's district, and his soon-to-be former constituents invited “Old Man Eloquent” to address them one last time. The majority of Adams's remarks on this occasion consist of an attack on President John Tyler. Adams broadens his assault by suggesting that there is a “conflict between freedom and slavery” and that the South's (and Tyler's) interests are not those of the nation. Adams withholds nothing in labeling slaveholders as hypocrites, double-dealers, and frauds. To preserve slavery, southern officeholders sought the acquisition of Texas, from which “ten slave-spotted” new states would be created to guarantee “the dominion of the slave-ridden over the free.” Rights, such as to petition, would be compromised; money from land sales would be wasted; tariff revenues would be reduced. All of the improvements that Adams pushed for in his first annual message would forever be starved for money.

For five and a half more years Adams served in the House, growing increasingly bitter, as his Braintree address suggests. The annexation of Texas and subsequent war with Mexico only confirmed to Adams the notion that the presence of the Slave Power, the political leverage of the southern slaveholding class, compromised the nation's future and the principles of the Declaration of Independence.