| Mr. Polk's fatal error in regard to the right of petition. |
It would have been wise for the slaveholders to have left this solution of the question undisturbed, but they did not see it so. On January 4th, 1836, Mr. Adams presented a petition from sundry citizens of Massachusetts containing the usual prayer, and said that "in conformity with the course heretofore adopted, he should move that the petition, without reading, be laid on the table." Mr. Patton interrupted Mr. Adams with an inquiry addressed to the Speaker as to whether the petition had been received by the House, and the Speaker replied that it had not. He said that, upon looking up the authorities, he "had formed the opinion that the first question to be decided, upon the motion of a member, was whether the petition be received or not." The Speaker, Mr. Polk, had now come out of his uncertainty about the right of petition including the reception of the petition by the House, as a constitutional obligation, and now definitely denied that the right of petition included the right to have the petition received by the House. This was a fatal move, a fatal mistake upon his part. The object professedly sought by all parties, except such Abolitionists as Mr. Slade, was the prevention of agitation upon the slavery question in the halls of Congress. Whether all were sincere in this profession is questionable. It had been insinuated that there were agitators upon this question from both sections of the country, who were disingenuously claiming to be classed with the maintainers of peace. It does really seem that the innuendo was justified as to certain of the Southerners by the position now assumed by Mr. Patton and Mr. Polk, and then by Mr. Glascock, who, immediately after the ruling of the Speaker, moved that this petition be not received. While Mr. Adams, who sincerely believed that reference as well as reception was a necessary consequence of the right of petition, had accommodated himself to the decision which the House had made a fortnight before, these Southern gentlemen were now proposing to drive the House from the solid middle ground, then occupied, toward a position which the majority considered to be an encroachment upon the constitutional right of petition, a movement upon their part which was certain, and known by all to be certain, to provoke an excited debate upon the question of slavery. It may be that they thought the refusal to receive one of these anti-slavery petitions would prevent any more from being presented, and that it was better to have it out once for all than to be continually receiving, and listening to the reading of, these petitions. If so, they were wofully mistaken.
| Mr. Adams' futile attempt to prevent slavery agitation in Congress. |
Mr. Adams now made one more effort to preserve the Southerners against the consequences of their own folly. He undertook to arrest the debate by calling for the application of the forty-fifth rule of the House, which required that no petition should be debated or decided on the day of its presentation. But the Speaker now decided that this rule could not apply to a petition until it had been received. The gates of Janus were flung wide open, and the House went into an agitation upon the subject, to which all that had gone before was only a prelude. The struggle lasted for more than four months, during which period petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District, signed by over thirty thousand persons, were poured into the House. The slavery question was at last brought before the people of the United States in a way most highly satisfactory to the most radical Abolitionist, and no matter what the immediate compromise upon the subject might be, it was evident to all farseeing minds then that a death-blow had been struck at slavery.
| The Pinckney resolutions. |
There is not space in this work to recount the scenes enacted on the floor of the House during these four exciting months, or even to give a résumé of the debate. The conflict was ended for the moment by the adoption, on May 25th (1836), of a series of resolutions reported by a committee appointed for the purpose, of which Mr. Pinckney, of South Carolina, was the chairman. These resolutions provided: "That Congress possesses no constitutional authority to interfere in any way with the institution of slavery in any of the States of this Confederacy; that Congress ought not to interfere with slavery in the District of Columbia; and whereas it is extremely important and desirable that the agitation of this subject should be finally arrested, for the purpose of restoring tranquillity to the public mind, ... that all petitions, memorials, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery, or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being printed or referred, be laid upon the table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon."
| The new rule of the House of Representatives in regard to the Abolition petitions. |