But it is time to resume the narrative and to let Mr. Adams's acts—of which after all it is possible to give only the briefest sketch, selecting a few of the more striking incidents—tell the tale of his Congressional life.
On February 14, 1835, Mr. Adams again presented two petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, but without giving rise to much excitement. The fusillade was, however, getting too thick and fast to be endured longer with indifference by the impatient Southerners. At the next session of Congress they concluded to try to stop it, and their ingenious scheme was to make Congress shot-proof, so to speak, against such missiles. On January 4, 1836, Mr. Adams presented an abolition petition couched in the usual form, and moved that it be laid on the table, as others like it had lately been. But in a moment Mr. Glascock, of Georgia, moved that the petition be not received. Debate sprang up on a point of order, and two days later, before the question of reception was determined, a resolution was offered by Mr. Jarvis, of Maine, declaring that the House would not entertain any petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. This resolution was supported on the ground that Congress had no constitutional power in the premises. Some days later, January 18, 1836, before any final action had been reached upon this proposition, Mr. Adams presented some more abolition petitions, one of them signed by "one hundred and forty-eight ladies, citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; for, I said, I had not yet brought myself to doubt whether females were citizens." The usual motion not to receive was made, and then a new device was resorted to in the shape of a motion that the motion not to receive be laid on the table.
On February 8, 1836, this novel scheme for shutting off petitions against slavery immediately upon their presentation was referred to a select committee of which Mr. Pinckney was chairman. On May 18 this committee reported in substance: 1. That Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in any State; 2. That Congress ought not to interfere with slavery in the District of Columbia; 3. That whereas the agitation of the subject was disquieting and objectionable, "all petitions, memorials, resolutions or papers, relating in any way or to any extent whatsoever to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid upon the table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon." When it came to taking a vote upon this report a division of the question was called for, and the yeas and nays were ordered. The first resolution was then read, whereupon Mr. Adams at once rose and pledged himself, if the House would allow him five minutes' time, to prove it to be false. But cries of "order" resounded; he was compelled to take his seat and the resolution was adopted by 182 to 9. Upon the second resolution he asked to be excused from voting, and his name was passed in the call. The third resolution with its preamble was then read, and Mr. Adams, so soon as his name was called, rose and said: "I hold the resolution to be a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, the rules of this House, and the rights of my constituents." He was interrupted by shrieks of "order" resounding on every side; but he only spoke the louder and obstinately finished his sentence before resuming his seat. The resolution was of course agreed to, the vote standing 117 to 68. Such was the beginning of the famous "gag" which became and long remained—afterward in a worse shape—a standing rule of the House. Regularly in each new Congress when the adoption of rules came up, Mr. Adams moved to rescind the "gag;" but for many years his motions continued to be voted down, as a matter of course. Its imposition was clearly a mistake on the part of the slave-holding party; free debate would almost surely have hurt them less than this interference with the freedom of petition. They had assumed an untenable position. Henceforth, as the persistent advocate of the right of petition, Mr. Adams had a support among the people at large vastly greater than he could have enjoyed as the opponent of slavery. As his adversaries had shaped the issue he was predestined to victory in a free country.
A similar scene was enacted on December 21 and 22, 1837. A "gag" or "speech-smothering" resolution being then again before the House, Mr. Adams, when his name was called in the taking of the vote, cried out "amidst a perfect war-whoop of 'order:' 'I hold the resolution to be a violation of the Constitution, of the right of petition of my constituents and of the people of the United States, and of my right to freedom of speech as a member of this House.'" Afterward, in reading over the names of members who had voted, the clerk omitted that of Mr. Adams, this utterance of his not having constituted a vote. Mr. Adams called attention to the omission. The clerk, by direction of the Speaker, thereupon called his name. His only reply was by a motion that his answer as already made should be entered on the Journal. The Speaker said that this motion was not in order. Mr. Adams, resolute to get upon the record, requested that his motion with the Speaker's decision that it was not in order might be entered on the Journal. The next day, finding that this entry had not been made in proper shape, he brought up the matter again. One of his opponents made a false step, and Mr. Adams "bantered him" upon it until the other was provoked into saying that, "if the question ever came to the issue of war, the Southern people would march into New England and conquer it." Mr. Adams replied that no doubt they would if they could; that he entered his resolution upon the Journal because he was resolved that his opponent's "name should go down to posterity damned to everlasting fame." No one ever gained much in a war of words with this ever-ready and merciless tongue.
Mr. Adams, having soon become known to all the nation as the indomitable presenter of anti-slavery petitions, quickly found that great numbers of people were ready to keep him busy in this trying task. For a long while it was almost as much as he could accomplish to receive, sort, schedule, and present the infinite number of petitions and memorials which came to him praying for the abolition of slavery and of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, and opposing the annexation of Texas. It was an occupation not altogether devoid even of physical danger, and calling for an amount of moral courage greater than it is now easy to appreciate. It is the incipient stage of such a conflict that tests the mettle of the little band of innovators. When it grows into a great party question much less courage is demanded. The mere presentation of an odious petition may seem in itself to be a simple task; but to find himself in a constant state of antagonism to a powerful, active, and vindictive majority in a debating body, constituted of such material as then made up the House of Representatives, wore hardly even upon the iron temper and inflexible disposition of Mr. Adams. "The most insignificant error of conduct in me at this time," he writes in April, 1837, "would be my irredeemable ruin in this world; and both the ruling political parties are watching with intense anxiety for some overt act by me to set the whole pack of their hireling presses upon me." But amid the host of foes, and aware that he could count upon the aid of scarcely a single hearty and daring friend, he labored only the more earnestly. The severe pressure against him begat only the more severe counter pressure upon his part.
Besides these natural and legitimate difficulties, Mr. Adams was further in the embarrassing position of one who has to fear as much from the imprudence of allies as from open hostility of antagonists, and he was often compelled to guard against a peculiar risk coming from his very coadjutors in the great cause. The extremists who had cast aside all regard for what was practicable, and who utterly scorned to consider the feasibility or the consequences of measures which seemed to them to be correct as abstract propositions of morality, were constantly urging him to action which would only have destroyed him forever in political life, would have stripped him of his influence, exiled him from that position in Congress where he could render the most efficient service that was in him, and left him naked of all usefulness and utterly helpless to continue that essential portion of the labor which could be conducted by no one else. "The abolitionists generally," he said, "are constantly urging me to indiscreet movements, which would ruin me, and weaken and not strengthen their cause." His family, on the other hand, sought to restrain him from all connection with these dangerous partisans. "Between these adverse impulses," he writes, "my mind is agitated almost to distraction.... I walk on the edge of a precipice almost every step that I take." In the midst of all this anxiety, however, he was fortunately supported by the strong commendation of his constituents which they once loyally declared by formal and unanimous votes in a convention summoned for the express purpose of manifesting their support. His feelings appear by an entry in his Diary in October, 1837:—
"I have gone [he said] as far upon this article, the abolition of slavery, as the public opinion of the free portion of the Union will bear, and so far that scarcely a slave-holding member of the House dares to vote with me upon any question. I have as yet been thoroughly sustained by my own State, but one step further and I hazard my own standing and influence there, my own final overthrow, and the cause of liberty itself for an indefinite time, certainly for more than my remnant of life. Were there in the House one member capable of taking the lead in this cause of universal emancipation, which is moving onward in the world and in this country, I would withdraw from the contest which will rage with increasing fury as it draws to its crisis, but for the management of which my age, infirmities, and approaching end totally disqualify me. There is no such man in the House."
September 15, 1837, he says: "I have been for some time occupied day and night, when at home, in assorting and recording the petitions and remonstrances against the annexation of Texas, and other anti-slavery petitions, which flow upon me in torrents." The next day he presented the singular petition of one Sherlock S. Gregory, who had conceived the eccentric notion of asking Congress to declare him "an alien or stranger in the land so long as slavery exists and the wrongs of the Indians are unrequited and unrepented of." September 28 he presented a batch of his usual petitions, and also asked leave to offer a resolution calling for a report concerning the coasting trade in slaves. "There was what Napoleon would have called a superb NO! returned to my request from the servile side of the House." The next day he presented fifty-one more like documents, and notes having previously presented one hundred and fifty more.
In December, 1837, still at this same work, he made a hard but fruitless effort to have the Texan remonstrances and petitions sent to a select committee instead of to that on foreign affairs which was constituted in the Southern interest. On December 29 he "presented several bundles of abolition and anti-slavery petitions," and said that, having declared his opinion that the gag-rule was unconstitutional, null, and void, he should "submit to it only as to physical force." January 3, 1838, he presented "about a hundred petitions, memorials, and remonstrances,—all laid on the table." January 15 he presented fifty more. January 28 he received thirty-one petitions, and spent that day and the next in assorting and filing these and others which he previously had, amounting in all to one hundred and twenty. February 14, in the same year, was a field-day in the petition campaign: he presented then no less than three hundred and fifty petitions, all but three or four of which bore more or less directly upon the slavery question. Among these petitions was one
"praying that Congress would take measures to protect citizens from the North going to the South from danger to their lives. When the motion to lay that on the table was made, I said that, 'In another part of the Capitol it had been threatened that if a Northern abolitionist should go to North Carolina, and utter a principle of the Declaration of Independence'—Here a loud cry of 'order! order!' burst forth, in which the Speaker yelled the loudest. I waited till it subsided, and then resumed, 'that if they could catch him they would hang him!' I said this so as to be distinctly heard throughout the hall, the renewed deafening shout of 'order! order!' notwithstanding. The Speaker then said, 'The gentleman from Massachusetts will take his seat;' which I did and immediately rose again and presented another petition. He did not dare tell me that I could not proceed without permission of the House, and I proceeded. The threat to hang Northern abolitionists was uttered by Preston of the Senate within the last fortnight."