John Quincy Adams: Congressional Debate over Motion for Censure

The career of John Quincy Adams had three distinct phases: diplomat, president, and congressman; the documents that best reveal his thinking and accomplishments are different for each time period. In 1830 Adams, who had served as the sixth president of the United States, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until his death in 1848. Adams's remarks of February 3, 1842, on the Congressional Debate over Motion for Censure constitute his response to a House of Representatives motion to censure him for an incident that had occurred on January 24, 1842. Deliberately antagonizing proponents of the “gag rule” that restricted the acceptance of constituent petitions about slavery, Adams had presented a petition from forty-six citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, asking that the Union be dissolved because the South was an excessive economic drain. While congressional debate over censure raged, Adams vigorously defended himself. In the debate, Adams placed the right of petition in the context of other irrevocable rights and pitted the North against the South.