John Quincy Adams: Address to Constituents at Braintree

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Are you incredulous of the possibility that the free representation of the North should be wheedled into the support of a system, so diametrically opposite to the first elements of true Democracy, and to the clearest interests of their own section? Mr. [Nathan] Appleton has apprised you of the charm by which New Hampshire has been converted into an anti-tariff State; and the same spell which has been of potency sufficient to fasten the Atherton gag upon the sacred right of petition, will find her equally ready to sacrifice all the inalienable rights of man to the Moloch of slavery, and to fasten, from the plunder of Mexico, ten slave-spotted States upon the Union, to settle for all time, and beyond the possibility of redemption, the preponderancy of Southern slavery over the democracy and the freedom of the North.…

It is then the sectional division of parties, or in other words, the conflict between freedom and slavery, which constitutes the axle round which the administration of your National Government revolves. All its measures of foreign and domestic policy, are but radiations from that centre. John Tyler is a Virginian slaveholder. All the affections of his soul are bound up in the system of supporting, spreading, and perpetuating the peculiar institutions of the South. The political division of parties with him, and with all Southern statesmen of his stamp, is a mere instrument of power, to purchase auxiliary support to the cause of slavery, even from the freemen of the North. Democracy! Why upon what foundation can Democracy find a foothold to stand, but upon the rights of man; upon the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence? Democracy and Slavery?… Is not the brand of double-dealer stamped on the forehead of every democratic slaveholder? Are not fraud and hypocrisy the religion of the man who calls himself a democrat, and holds his fellow-man in bondage?

Fellow Citizens, I have opened and exposed to your view the dark chambers of the motive of Andrew Jackson, who first broached the doctrine of giving away those public lands to speculating adventurers, or to the States in which they are situated, and of John Tyler, for adhering, with such unrelenting tenacity, to the system of squandering the whole of this exhaustless treasure in the current annual expenditures of the National Administration; in doubling armies, quadrupling navies, and filching funds to buy up popular newspapers, and hungry sycophants, to pander for presidential electioneering. The motive is one, though the means are not the same. It comes from the store-house of Nullification.… It is of the same family with the war against Mexico for the annexation of Texas; with the war against England for the Island of Cuba; or to burn at the stake the self-emancipators of the Creole. Its most dreaded foes are the self-evident truths, the right of petition, the panoply of the habeas corpus, the trial by jury, the freedom of speech, of the press, and of legislative debate. The first founder of the family is SLAVERY. Its ultimate aspiration of destiny is, the dominion of the slave-ridden over the free. Its antipathy to the African slave-trade is for the monopoly of the market in human flesh. Its fearful but remorseless foreboding of the future, is the freedom of all mankind—and its abhorrence of all internal improvement by the mighty arm of the Union, is to rivet forever the manacles and fetters of the slave.