A Disease in the Public Mind (23 page)

He went on to say that even if the petitioners were mulattoes, and supposedly not respectable, did that mean they had no right to petition? Since when had petitioners been required to meet a character test? Moreover, who was responsible for their reputations? Wasn't it well known in the South that that there were often “great resemblances” between the progeny of colored people and the white men who claimed possession of them?

The House of Representatives Register of Debates now recorded the words: “Great agitation in the house!” Even this was an understatement. Dixon Lewis of Alabama, who weighed more than four hundred pounds, rose to roar that the House should “punish severely such an infraction of its decorum and its rules.” If the House refused, he recommended that “every member from the slave states should immediately, in a body, quit this House, and go home to their constituents. We no longer have any business here.”

“I will second the motion for punishment,” shouted a congressman from Georgia, “And go all lengths for it.”

Others bellowed, “Expel him!”

“No, no!” shouted others.

Julius Alford of Georgia seized the floor and declared: “As an act of justice to the South, the petition should be taken from the House and burnt!”

Waddy Thompson of South Carolina made a formal motion to censure Adams for “gross disrespect for the House” and called for him to be “brought to the bar to receive the severe censure of the Speaker.”
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Here was political obtuseness wafted by outrage and anxiety to the ultimate extreme. The Southerners were talking to each other, with little or no awareness that the rest of the nation was watching and listening. They were abusing and threatening a former president of the United States who was the son of a former president. They were endowing Old Man Eloquent with a
popularity in the northern states that he had never come close to achieving before.

It was only human for Adams to relish this burst of fame. But the satisfaction had its dark side. Most of his new admirers were abolitionists, and Adams's comments on mulattoes resembling their owners was a lurch in their vindictive, Southerner-slandering direction that carried him a long way from his original intent to protest the gag rule as a violation of the right of free speech.

Adams had personal reasons to dislike Southerners. They had elected Jefferson and ended his father's political career on a note of repudiation. John Quincy had hoped his reelection for a second term would compensate for the stain and pain of his father's defeat. Instead, he had been ousted from the White House by Tennessee's Andrew Jackson with the help of southern votes. Old Hickory's role as a slave owner was mostly a coincidence. But in the atmosphere of rancor and hatred created by the abolitionists and the South's reaction to them, it was difficult if not impossible for Adams to avoid thinking and feeling with an abolitionist vocabulary.

•      •      •

Beyond heated and abusive oratory on both sides, nothing came of the first southern attempt to censure John Quincy Adams. He continued to agitate Congress with petitions and declamations against the gag rule. In 1839, fate handed Adams an opportunity to strike a blow against slavery that won him even more national attention. A Spanish slave ship, the
Amistad
, was transporting fifty-three blacks to a Cuban port when the unwilling passengers revolted, killed the captain and most of the crew, and ordered a surviving white officer to sail back to Africa. Instead he sailed to America, where a U.S. warship captured the
Amistad
and guided it into New Haven, Connecticut's harbor.

Spain demanded that the slaves be returned to Cuba, where they would be tried for piracy. President Van Buren was inclined to give them up, and more than a few southern members of Congress supported him. But abolitionists rushed to defend them; their newspapers portrayed the slaves' leader, Cinque, as a hero. A violent legal tangle exploded in the Connecticut
courts. The case soon reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams volunteered to represent the slaves. Although the court had a majority of Southerners on its bench, they listened respectfully to Adams's argument that the slaves should be released because both Spain and the United States had outlawed the slave trade. The Supreme Court freed the slaves and they returned to Africa accompanied by five Christian missionaries.
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•      •      •

Back in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison was drifting toward a new variation of his extremist views—a dissolution of the Union. He began denouncing the Constitution for the bargain the founders had made with slave owners. He called on people of the North “to demand the repeal of the Union or the abolition of slavery.”

Garrison claimed the North would be forever sinful if they ignored this moral ultimatum. Some forty-five citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, decided to send Congressman Adams a petition asking Congress to begin working out “measures peaceably to dissolve the union of these states.” They did not mention slavery; they claimed to be writing as taxpayers. In their opinion they were not getting their money's worth from the federal arrangement.

When Adams introduced this petition, southern congressman by the dozens lost their tempers. One man declared his intention to get rid of a certain member,

     
Who in the course of one revolving moon

     
Was poet, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.
¹³

A motion for censure was swiftly voted and approved by a majority of Adams's own Whig Party. The Southern Democrats were equally ferocious, of course. But the Whigs had decided that getting rid of Adams was a good way to bolster the link between the northern and southern sections of their unstable political enterprise. The man whom the Whigs selected to submit the resolution was Thomas F. Marshall of Kentucky, the nephew of the late
Chief Justice John Marshall, a man whose reputation as an interpreter of the Constitution had no equal.

Adams welcomed the opportunity to defend himself. For the next two weeks, he held the floor, day after day, flinging abuse and argument with a vehemence and persistence that stunned his opponents. He told Thomas Marshall to resign from Congress and enroll in some law school that might teach him about “the rights of the citizens of these states and the members of this House.” He also hoped that Marshall would learn to control his fondness for alcohol. Again and again Adams ridiculed Southerners for having a double standard—crying disloyalty to the Union at Northern citizens for their petitions against slavery while holding the nation hostage to tolerating slavery with similar threats of secession.

His assaults regularly contained the sort of personal barb that left Thomas Marshall red-faced with chagrin. Adams asked Congressman Henry A. Wise, the future governor of Virginia, how he could have the nerve to attack him. Everyone knew Wise had encouraged a Kentucky congressman to challenge a new Maine member to a duel for supposedly insulting him. The Kentuckian had killed the New Englander, and some members had wanted to censure Wise, but Adams had defended him because a censure trial would have violated his constitutional rights. “Is it possible I saved this blood-stained man,” Adams roared, “although his hands were reeking with the blood of murder?”
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All this and much more appeared in the daily papers. People in every state in the North read Adams's words with growing fascination. In Boston, a huge meeting convened in storied Faneuil Hall with William Lloyd Garrison presiding. It was jammed with Boston's so-called “best people,” who a few short years before would cross the street rather than pass Garrison on the sidewalk. It was electrifying evidence of the impact Old Man Eloquent was having in New England.

At the end of Adams's two weeks of oratory against his censure, the battered southern Whigs said nothing while their anxious northern brethren proposed a motion to table the measure. An ecstatic Garrison gloated in
The Liberator
that Adams had “frightened the boastful South almost out of her
wits.” Theodore Weld had worked behind the scenes to supply Adams with material for his daily harangues. In a burst of optimism he would repudiate a few years later, Weld told his wife Angelina that from this “first victory over the slaveowners in a body. . . their downfall takes its date.”
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•      •      •

Adams sensed he was close to an even bigger victory—the defeat of the gag rule. One of his Midwest supporters, Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, submitted a resolution opposing the southern argument for regaining some Virginia slaves who had revolted aboard the ship
Creole
while en route to New Orleans. The slaves had sailed the ship to the Bahamas, where the British freed them. Without permitting any of the apparatus of debate that Adams had exploited, the southern Whigs censured Giddings. He resigned from Congress and immediately ran for reelection, winning in a landslide.

Sensing a shift in public opinion, Adams's son Charles, having won a seat in the Massachusetts legislature, drafted a resolution that called on Congress to draw up a constitutional amendment that would eliminate the provision entitling Southerners to count five slaves as three men in apportioning representatives to Congress.

On the defensive now, the House's majority created a select committee to consider the proposal and made John Quincy Adams the chairman. It was a sign that they had learned a hard lesson from the censure debacle. The rulers of the House made sure the rest of the committee was chosen with a view to making rejection a certainty. When they submitted their negative report, the House adopted it by a huge majority.

Undaunted, Massachusetts submitted the resolution three more times in the next year (1844). It went nowhere, of course. Some Southerners called it “the Hartford Convention Amendment,” implying that they had not forgotten New England's flirtation with secession in 1814. The House refused even to print copies of the later submissions to circulate among the members. But the onslaught made some southern members wish they had never made an enemy of Old Man Eloquent.
¹⁶

Adams waited until the first session of the next Congress in 1845 to introduce a resolution to abandon the gag rule. Congress approved it 105 to 80 with virtually no debate. A startling number of northern Democrats supported Adams—evidence of the growing strength of antislavery sentiment in that section of the country. In his diary, John Quincy Adams wrote: “Blessed, ever blessed be the name of God.” There was little doubt that he now saw himself exclusively as a warrior for righteousness, in the style of William Lloyd Garrison—the opposite of the judicious politician he had once been.
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CHAPTER 14

The Slave Patrols

Is there evidence unmentioned in the bitter debates that engulfed Congress in the 1830s and 1840s that demonstrates how seriously Southerners took the danger of slave insurrections—the reason they gave for their angry determination to suppress petitions calling for the emancipation of their slaves?

Probably the best answer to that question is a civic duty performed by thousands of southern men. Every night, in almost every county in the South, armed riders patrolled the roads, challenging every black man they encountered, demanding to know his name, where he was going, and why. If the man did not have a letter from his master justifying his journey, he was given fifteen strokes of the lash. If he was defiant or tried to run away, the number was raised to thirty-nine.

If these midnight riders saw a group of blacks meeting in a field or woods off the road, they immediately dispersed them and detained a half dozen for questioning. They often searched slave cabins for weapons or stolen goods. They had the power to question whites too, and enter their homes without a warrant. The riders were drawn from the local militia in each county and were paid for their time.
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This was the world of the South's slave patrols. A visitor to Charleston in the 1850s was astonished by the way patrols “pass through the city at all hours.” When he inquired about them, he was told that Charleston had many criminals who needed watching. But the visitor soon concluded that the real reason for the patrols was “the slave population.” One letter writer to a South Carolina newspaper remarked that “in this country at least, no arguments will be necessary to prove the necessity of such a police.”

Slave insurrections, real or rumored, were not the only reason slave patrols were vigilant. In the 1830s, an incendiary book written by an ex-slave, David Walker, triggered widespread anxiety throughout the South. The North Carolina legislature created a new committee, whose only duty was the supervision of slave patrols. Three men in each county were given semi-judicial authority to dismiss inept or unreliable patrollers and hear complaints about them.

In some places where slaves outnumbered whites by large ratios, private patrols were also organized. Planters in St. Matthew's Parish, South Carolina, created a Vigilant Society with about twenty members. Their chief worry was not an insurrection but the steep rise in theft from their plantations. Slaves stole jewelry, clothing—anything portable—and headed for the local railroad station. Blacks working for the railroad gave them money and sold the stolen goods somewhere up the line.

On Edisto Island, an auxiliary association also recruited members to supplement the regular slave patrollers. The residents of the island had a special reason to be worried. Blacks outnumbered whites fifteen to one. Too often “the midnight incendiary has escaped with impunity and the assassin has perfected his schemes of horror,” one jittery white resident said. The auxiliary association asked the state to give them the same legal authority as the official patrollers. Sometimes these spontaneous associations agreed that they would whip only their own slaves. If a patroller whipped a slave so violently that he was unable to work, his owner could sue the patroller.