On January 16th, 1833, President Jackson communicated, in a message, the ordinance of the convention of South Carolina nullifying the acts of Congress laying duties on the importation of foreign commodities, with the counteracting measures he proposed to pursue. On the 4th of February, on a bill for a modification of the tariff, Mr. Adams moved to strike out the enacting clause, thereby destroying the bill. In a speech characterized by the fearless spirit by which he was actuated, he declared his opinion that neither the bill then in discussion nor any other on the subject of the tariff ought to pass, until it was "known whether there was any measure by which a state could defeat the laws of the Union." The ordinance of South Carolina had been called a "pacific measure." It was just as much so as placing a pistol at the breast of a traveller and demanding his money was pacific. Until that weapon was removed there ought to be no modification of the tariff. Mr. Adams then entered at large into the duty of government to protect all the great interests of the citizens. But protection might be extended in different forms to different interests. The complaint was, that government took money out of the pockets of one portion of the community, to give it to another. In extending protection this must always be more or less the case. But, then, while the rights of one party were protected in this way, the rights of the other party were protected equally in another way. This he proceeded to illustrate. In the southern and southwestern parts of this Union there existed a certain interest, which he need not more particularly designate, which enjoyed, under the constitution and laws of the United States, an especial protection peculiar to itself. It was first protected by representation. There were on that floor upwards of twenty members who represented what in other states had no representation at all. It was not three days since a gentleman from Georgia said that the species of property now alluded to was "the machinery of the South." Now, that machinery had twenty odd representatives in that hall; representatives elected, not by that machinery, but by those who owned it. Was there such representation in any other portion of the Union? That machinery had ever been to the South, in fact, the ruling power of this government. Was this not protection? This very protection had taken millions and millions of money from the free laboring population of this country, and put it into the pockets of the owners of Southern machinery. He did not complain of this. He did not say that it was not all right. What he said was, that the South possessed a great interest protected by the constitution of the United States. He was for adhering to the bargain; but he did not wish to be understood as saying that he would agree to it if the bargain was now to be made over again.
This interest was protected by another provision in the constitution of the United States, by which "no person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." What was this but protection to this machinery of the South? And let it be observed that a provision like this ran counter to all the tenor of legislation in the free states. It was contrary to all the notions and feelings of the people of the North to deliver a man up to any foreign authority, unless he had been guilty of some crime; and, but for such a clause in the compact, a Southern gentleman, who had lost an article of his machinery, would never recover him back from the free states.
The constitution contained another clause guaranteeing protection to the same interest. It guaranteed to every state in the Union a republican form of government, protection against invasion, and, on the application of the Legislature or Executive of any state, furnished them with protection against domestic violence. Now, everybody knew that where this machinery existed the state was more liable to domestic violence than elsewhere, because that machinery sometimes exerted a self-moving power. The call for this protection had very recently been made, and it had been answered, and the power of the Union had been exerted to insure the owners of this machinery from domestic violence.
On the 28th of the ensuing February, Mr. Adams, on the part of the minority of the Committee on Manufactures, made a report, signed by himself and Lewis Condit, of New Jersey, which was read and ordered to be printed by the House. In this report he took occasion to express his dissent from the doctrine of the message, which he asserted to be that in all countries generally, and especially in our own, the strongest and best part of our population—the basis of society, and the friends preëminently of freedom—are the "wealthy landholders." This he controverted with a spirit at once suggestive and sarcastic, as new, incorrect, and incompatible with the foundation of our political institutions. He maintained that this assertion was not true even in that part of the Union where the cultivators of the soil are slaves; for, although there the landholders possess a large portion of the wealth of the community, they were far from constituting an equal proportion of its strength. Nor was it true in that portion of the Union where the cultivators of the soil earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, that they were the best part of society. They were as good as, but no better than, the other classes of the community. The doctrine is in opposition to the Declaration of Independence and the government of the Union, which are founded on a very different principle—the principle that all men are born equal, and with equal rights. It cannot be assumed as a foundation of national policy, and is of a most alarming and dangerous tendency, threatening the peace and directly tending to "the dissolution of the Union, by a complicated civil and servile war." He traced its consequences, present and future, in the proposition to give away the public lands, thereby withdrawing all aid from this source to objects of internal improvement; and in the destiny to which it consigns our manufacturing interests, and those of the handicraftsmen and the mechanics of our populous cities and flourishing towns, for the benefit of these wealthy landholders.
The insincerity of the message and the danger of its doctrines he elucidates with scrutinizing severity, exposing its fallacies, and showing that, by its recommendations, "a nation, consisting of ten millions of freemen, must be crippled in the exercise of their associated power, unmanned of all the energies applicable to the improvement of their own condition, by the doubts, scruples, or fanciful discontents, of a portion among themselves less in number than double the number in the single city of New York."
Its doctrine, which divides the people into the best and worst part of the population, is here denounced as "the never-failing source of tyranny and oppression, of civil strife, the shedding of brothers' blood, and the total extinction of freedom."
This report earnestly entreats the general government not to abdicate, by non user, the power vested in them of appropriating public money to great national objects of internal improvements, and declares the final result of the doctrine of abdicating powers arbitrarily designated as doubtful is but the degradation of the nation, the reducing itself to impotence, by chaining its own hands, fettering its own feet, and thus disabling itself from bettering its own condition. The impotence resulting from the inability to employ its own faculties for its own improvement, is the principle upon which the roving Tartar denies himself a permanent habitation, because to him the wandering shepherd is the best part of the population; upon which the American savage refuses to till the ground, because to him the hunter of the woods is the best part of the population. "Imperfect civilization, in all stages of human society, shackles itself with fanatical prejudices of exclusive favor to its own occupations; as the owner of a plantation with a hundred slaves believes the summit of human virtue to be attained only by independent farmers, cultivators of the soil."
Mr. Adams avers that the spirit of these recommendations indicates "a proposed revolution in the government of the Union, the avowed purpose of which is to reduce the general government to a simple machine. Simplicity," he adds, "is the essential characteristic in the condition of slavery. It is by the complication of the government alone that the freedom of mankind can be assured. If the people of these United States enjoy a greater share of liberty than any other nation upon earth, it is because, of all the governments upon earth, theirs is the most complicated." The simplicity which the message recommends is "an abdication of the power to do good; a divestment of all power in this confederate people to improve their own condition."
The recommendation of the message, that the public lands shall cease as soon as practicable to be a source of public revenue,—that they shall be sold at a reduced price to actual settlers, and the future disposition of them be surrendered to the states in which they lie,—Mr. Adams condemns as the giving away of the national domain, the property of the whole people, to individual adventurers; and as taking away the property of one portion of the citizens, and giving it to another, the plundered portion of the community being insultingly told that those on whom their lands are lavished are the best part of the population. Neither this, nor the surrender of them to the states in which they lie, can be done without prejudicing the claims of the United States, and of every particular state within which there are no public lands, and trampling under foot solemn engagements entered into before the adoption of the constitution. He reprobates thus giving away lands which were purchased by the blood and treasure of our revolutionary fathers and ourselves, which, if duly managed, might prove an inexhaustible fund for centuries to come. He maintains that the policy indicated by this message regards the manufacturing interests of the country "as a victim to be sacrificed." This view leads him into an illustrative and powerful argument on the duty of protection to domestic industry, in which are set forth its nature, limitations, and impressive obligations.
In this report the absurd doctrines of nullification and secession are canvassed, and it is shown that they never can be carried out in practice but by a dissolution of the Union. The encouragement given by the policy of the administration to the unjust claims and groundless pretensions of South Carolina is exposed. The assumed irreconcilableness of the interests of the great masses of population which geographically divide the Union, of which one part is entirely free, and the other consists of masters and slaves, which is the foundation of those doctrines, is denied, and the question declared to be only capable of being determined by experiment under the compact formed by the constitution of the United States. The nature of that compact is analyzed, as well as the effect of that representation of property which it grants to the slaveholding states, and which has secured to them "the entire control of the national policy, and, almost without exception, the possession of the highest executive office of the Union." The causes and modes of operation by which this has been attained Mr. Adams illustrates to this effect: The Northern and wholly free states conceded that, while in the popular branch of the Legislature they themselves should have a representation proportioned only to their numbers, the slaveholders of the South should, in addition to their proportional numbers, have a representation for three fifths of their living property—their machinery; while the citizens of the free states have no addition to their number of representatives on account of their property; nor have their looms and manufactories, or their owners in their behalf, a single representative. The consequent disproportion of numbers of the slaveholding representation in the House of Representatives has secured the absolute control of the general policy of the government, and especially of the fiscal system, the revenues and expenditures of the nation. Thus, while the free states are represented only according to their numbers, the slaveholders are represented also for their property. The equivalent for this privilege provided by the constitution is that the slaveholders shall bear a heavier burden of all direct taxation. But, by the ascendency which their excess of representation gives them in the enactment of laws, they have invariably in time of peace excluded all direct taxation, and thereby enjoyed their excess of representation without any equivalent whatever. This is, in substance, an evasion of the bilateral provision in the constitution. It gives an operation entirely one-sided. It is a privilege of the Southern and slaveholding section of the Union, without any equivalent whatever to the Northern and North-western freemen. Always united in the purpose of regulating the affairs of the whole Union by the standard of the slaveholding interest, the disproportionate numbers of this section in the electoral colleges have enabled them, in ten out of twelve quadriennial elections, to confer the chief magistracy on one of their own citizens. Their suffrages at every election have been almost exclusively confined to a candidate of their own caste. Availing themselves of the divisions which, from the nature of man, always prevail in communities entirely free, they have sought and found out auxiliaries in other quarters of the Union, by associating the passions of parties and the ambition of individuals with their own purposes to establish and maintain throughout the confederated nation the slaveholders' policy. The office of Vice-President—a station of high dignity, but of little other than contingent power—has been usually, by their indulgence, conceded to a citizen of the other section; but even this political courtesy was superseded at the election before the last (1829), and both the offices of President and Vice-President of the United States were, by the preponderancy of slaveholding votes, bestowed upon citizens of two adjoining slaveholding states. "At this moment (1833) the President of the United States, the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Chief Justice of the United States, are all citizens of this favored portion of this united republic."