Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams.

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The report was signed by ten members of the committee, including the
chairman. The resolution with which it closed provided for submitting to
the States a proposed modification of the constitution, by substituting
the words "majority of the whole number," instead of the words "two
thirds," by which the power of the House of Representatives to pass a
law, notwithstanding the veto of the President, is at present
restricted.

The report was agreed to in the house by a majority of one hundred ayes
to ninety nays, and the resolution itself passed by a majority of
ninety-eight ayes to ninety nays; but the constitution, in such cases,
requiring two thirds majority, it was of consequence rejected.

In November, 1842, Mr. Adams delivered a lecture before the Franklin
Lyceum, at Providence, Rhode Island, on the Social Compact, in which he
enters into "an examination of the principles of democracy, aristocracy,
and universal suffrage, as exemplified in a historical review of the
present constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with some
notice of the origin of human government, and remarks on the theories of
divine right, as maintained by Hobbes and Sir Robert Filmer, on one
side, and by Sydney, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, on the other."

He shows, from the history of Massachusetts, that the fundamental
principle asserted in the fifth article of our declaration of rights,
that all power resides originally in _the people_, is derived from the
above-named writers, and explains how this power has been practically
exercised by the people of that state. The assertion of Rousseau, that
the social compact can be formed only by unanimous consent, because the
rule itself that a majority of votes shall prevail can only be
established by agreement, that is, by compact, Mr. Adams controverts,
maintaining in opposition to it that the social compact constituting
the body-politic is, and by the law of nature must be, a compact not
merely of individuals, but of families. On this view of the subject he
largely animadverts. The philosophical examination of the foundations
of civil society, of human governments, and of the rights and duties of
man, he views as among the consequences of the Protestant Reformation.
The question raised by Martin Luther involved the whole theory of _the
rights_ of individual man, paramount to all human authority. The
talisman of _human rights_ dissolved the spell of political as well as
of ecclesiastical power. The Calvinists of Geneva and the Puritans of
England contested the right of kings to prescribe articles of faith to
their people, and this question necessarily drew after it the general
question of the origin of all human government. In search of its
principle, Hobbes, a royalist, affirmed that the state of nature
between man and man was a state of war, whence it followed that
government originated in _conquest_. This theory is directly opposite
to that of Jesus Christ. It cuts the gordian knot with the sword,
extinguishes all the rights of man, and makes fear the corner-stone of
government. It is the only theory upon which slavery can be justified,
as conformable to the law of nature. This is Sir John Falstaff's law,
when, speaking of Justice Shallow, he says, "If the young dace be a
bait for the old pike, I see no reason in _the law of nature_ why I may
not snap at _him_." Sir Robert Filmer, by a theory far more plausible,
though not more sound, than that of Hobbes, derived the origin of human
government from the Scriptures of the Old Testament, from the grant of
the earth to Adam, and afterwards to Noah.

But the vital error of Filmer was in assuming that the natural
authority of the father over the child was either permanent or
unlimited; and still more that the authority of the husband over the
wife was unlimited. Sir Robert Filmer did not perceive that by the laws
of nature and of God every individual human being is born with rights
which no other individual, or combination of individuals, can take
away; that all exercise of human authority must be under the limitation
of right and wrong; and that all despotic power over human beings is
exercised in _defiance_ of the laws of nature and of God--all, Sir John
Falstaff's law of nature between the young dace and the old pike.

The history of Filmer's work was remarkable. It was composed and
published in the heat of the struggle between King Charles the First
and the Commons of England, which terminated in the overthrow of the
monarchy, and in the death of King Charles upon the scaffold. It was
the theory of government on which _the cause_ of the house of Stuart
was sustained. No man can be surprised that such a cause was swept away
by a moral and political whirlwind; that it carried with it all the
institutions of civil society, so that its march was a wild desolation.
James, by relying on the principles of Filmer's theory, fell back into
the arms of the Church of Rome, and vainly struggled to turn back the
tide of religious reformation, and revive the divine right of kings,
and passive obedience, and non-resistance. The republican spirit had
slumbered on the white cliffs of Albion, and in his sleep, like the
man-mountain in Lilliput, had been pinned down to the earth by the
threads of a spider's web for cords. On the first reaeppearance of
Filmer's book, he awoke, and, like the strong man in Israel, at the
cost of his own life, shook down the temple of Dagon, and buried
himself and the Philistines again under its ruins.

The discourses of John Locke concerning government demolished while
they immortalized the work of Filmer, whose name and book are now
remembered only to be detested. But the first principles of morals and
politics, which have long been settled, acquire the authority of
self-evident truths, which, when first discussed, may have been
vehemently and portentously contested. John Locke, a kindred soul to
Algernon Sydney, seven years after his death published an elaborate
system of government, in which he declares the "false principles and
foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers are detected and
overthrown." Subsequently, he published an essay concerning the true
original extent and end of civil government. "The principles," says Mr.
Adams, "of Sydney and Locke constitute the foundation of the North
American Declaration of Independence; and, together with the subsequent
writings of Montesquieu and Rousseau, that of the constitution of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and of the constitution of the United
States." Neither of these constitutions separately, nor the two in
combined harmony, can, without a gross and fraudulent perversion of
language, be termed a _Democracy_. They are neither democracy,
aristocracy, nor monarchy. They form together a mixed government,
compounded not only of the three elements of democracy, aristocracy,
and monarchy, but with a fourth added element, _Confederacy_. The
constitution of the United States when adopted was so far from being
considered as a democracy, that Patrick Henry charged it, in the
Virginia Convention, with an awful squinting towards monarchy. The
tenth number of the Federalist, written by James Madison, is an
elaborate and unanswerable essay upon the vital and radical difference
between a democracy and a republic. But it is impossible to disconnect
the relation between names and things. When the anti-federal party
dropped the name of Republicans to assume that of _Democrats_, their
principles underwent a corresponding metamorphosis; and they are now
the most devoted and most obsequious champions of executive power--the
very life-guard of the commander of the armies and navies of this
Union. The name of Democracy was assumed because it was discovered to
be _very taking_ among the multitude; yet, after all, it is but the
investment of the _multitude_ with absolute power. The constitutions of
the United States and of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are both the
work of the people--one of the Union, the other of the State--not of
the whole people by the phantom of universal suffrage, but of the whole
people by that portion of them capable of contracting for the whole.
They are not democracy, nor aristocracy, nor monarchy, but a compound
of them all, of which democracy is the oxygen, or vital air, too pure
in itself for human respiration, but which in the union of other
elements, equally destructive in themselves and less pure, forms that
moral and political atmosphere in which we live, and move, and have our
being.

The preceding abstract, given almost wholly in the language of Mr.
Adams, shows the general drift of this characteristic essay.

On the 17th of September, 1842, a convention of delegates from the
district he represented received Mr. Adams at Braintree, and expressed
their thanks for his services on the floor of Congress, especially for
his fidelity in their defence "against every attempt of Southern
representatives and their Northern allies to sacrifice at the altar of
slavery the freedom of speech and the press, the right of petition, the
protection of free labor, and the immunities and privileges of Northern
citizens." Mr. Adams, in reply, after expressing his sensibility at
their unabated confidence in the integrity of his intentions, and in his
capacity to serve them, declared that it had been his endeavor to
discharge all the duties of his station "faithfully and gratefully to
them; faithfully to our native and beloved Commonwealth; faithfully to
our whole common country, the North American Union; faithfully to the
world of mankind, in every quarter of the globe, and under every variety
of condition or complexion; faithfully to that creator, God, who rules
the world in justice and mercy, and to whom our final account must be
made up by the standard of those attributes." He then proceeded to
state, that on receiving their invitation to attend that meeting, it had
been his intention to avail himself of the opportunity to unfold to them
the professions, principles, and practices, of the federal
administration of these United States, under the successive Presidents
invested with executive power, from the day when he took his seat as
their representative in Congress to the then present hour.

"I trusted it would be in my power to present to your contemplation,
not only the outward and ostensible indications of federal policy,
proclaimed and trumpeted abroad as the maxims of the Jackson, Van
Buren, and Tyler administrations, but to lay bare their secret
purposes, and never yet divulged designs for the future government
or dissolution of this Union.

"Further reflection convinced me that this exposition would require
more time than you could possibly devote to one meeting to hear me.
My friend and colleague, Mr. Appleton, has, in an answer to an
invitation of his constituents to a public dinner, lifted a corner
of the veil, and opened a glance at the monstrous and horrible
object beneath it; but South Carolina nullification itself, with its
appendages of separation, secession, and the forty-bale theory, was
but the struggles of Quixotism dreaming itself Genius, to erect on
the basis of state sovereignty a system for seating South Carolina
slavery on the throne of this Union in the event of success; or of
severing the present Union, and instituting, with a tier of embryo
Southern States to be wrested from the dismemberment of Mexico, a
Southern slaveholding confederation to balance the free Republic of
the North.

"'The passage,' says Mr. Appleton, 'of the revenue bill imposing
discriminating duties with a view to the protection and
encouragement of American industry, is, under the circumstances, an
event of the very highest importance. Notwithstanding the system had
been formerly established in 1816, and fortified by succeeding
legislation; notwithstanding its success in the development of our
resources and the establishment of manufactures and arts, surpassing
the expectation of the most sanguine; notwithstanding the immense
investments of capital made on the faith of the national legislation
inviting such application, the attempt was seriously entertained of
breaking down this whole system, with a reckless disregard of
consequences, either in the wanton destruction of capital, or, what
is far more important, in the general paralysis of the industry of
the country. _The origin of this attempt may be traced to the mad
ambition of certain politicians of South Carolina, who, in 1832,
formed the project of a Southern Confederacy, severed from the rest
of the Union, with that state for its centre, as affording more
security to the slave states for their peculiar institutions than
exist under the general government._

"'This project led to the invention of a theory of political
economy, which was maintained with an ingenuity and perseverance
worthy of a better cause, founded on the assumption that all imports
are, in effect, direct taxes upon exports. So indefatigable were the
promulgators of this theory, that the whole South was made to
believe that a protective tariff was a system of plunder levied upon
their productions of cotton, rice, and tobacco, which constituted
the bulk of our exports to foreign markets.'"

Mr. Adams then proceeds to state that the principles of nullification
were never more inflexibly maintained, never more inexorably pursued,
than they had been by all that portion of the South which had given
them countenance, from the day of the death of William Henry Harrison
to the present, and that nullification is the creed of the executive
mansion at Washington, the acting President's _conscience_, and the
woof of all his vetoes.

"Nullification," he adds, "portentous and fatal as it is to the
prospects and welfare of this Union, is not the only instrument of
Southern domination wielded by the executive arm at Washington. The
dismemberment of our neighboring republic of Mexico, and the acquisition
of an immense portion of her territories, was a gigantic and darling
project of Andrew Jackson, and is another instrument wielded for the
same purpose.

"Within five weeks after the proclamation of the constitution of the
Republic of Texas followed the battle of San Jacinto; and from that
day the struggles of the Southern politicians, who ruled the
councils of this nation, were for upwards of two years unremitting,
and unrestrained by any principles of honor, honesty, and truth:
openly avowed, and audaciously proclaimed, whenever they dared;
clandestinely pursued, under delusive masks and false colors,
whenever the occasion required.

"No sooner was the event of the battle of San Jacinto known than
memorials and resolutions, from various parts of the Union, were
poured in upon Congress, calling upon that body for the immediate
recognition of the independence of the Republic of Texas. Many of
these memorials and resolutions came from the free states, and one
of them from the Legislature of Connecticut, then blindly devoted to
the rank Southern, sectional policy of the Jackson administration,
by that infatuation of Northern sympathy with Southern interests,
which Mr. Appleton points out to our notice, and the true purposes
of which had already been sufficiently divulged in an address of Mr.
Clement C. Clay to the Legislature of Alabama. But there was another
more hidden impulse to this extreme solicitude for the recognition
of the independence of Texas working in the free states, quite as
ready to assume the mask and cap of liberty as the slave-dealing
champions of the rights of man. The Texan land and liberty jobbers
had spread the contagion of their land-jobbing traffic all over the
free states throughout the Union. Land-jobbing, stock-jobbing,
slave-jobbing, rights-of-man-jobbing, were all, hand in hand,
sweeping over the land like a hurricane. The banks were plunging
into desperate debts, preparing for a universal suspension of specie
payment, under the shelter of legislative protection to flood the
country with irredeemable paper. Gambling speculation was the
madness of the day; and, in the wide-spread ruin which we are now
witnessing as the last stage of this moral pestilence, Texan bonds
and Texan lands form no small portion of the fragments from the
wreck of money corporations contributing their assets of two or
three cents to the dollar. All these interests furnished vociferous
declaimers for the recognition of Texan independence."

Mr. Adams next states the proceedings of Congress on this subject during
the whole of the residue of the Jackson administration, terminating with
the recognition by Congress of the independence of Texas. At this period
Mr. Van Buren--a Northern man with Southern principles--assumed the
functions of President of the United States. But the recognition of the
independence of Texas availed nothing without her annexation to the
United States. In October, 1837, a formal proposition from the Republic
of Texas for such annexation was communicated to Congress, with the
statement that it had been declined by Mr. Van Buren. But the passion
for the annexation of Texas was not to be so disconcerted. Memorials for
and against its annexation poured into Congress, and were referred to
the Committee on Foreign Affairs. "In the debate which arose from their
report," says Mr. Adams, "I exposed the whole system of duplicity and
perfidy towards Mexico, which had marked the Jackson administration from
its commencement to its close. It silenced the clamors for the
annexation of Texas to this Union for three years, till the catastrophe
of the Van Buren administration. The people of the free states were
lulled into the belief that the whole project was abandoned, and that
they should hear no more of the slave-trade cravings for the annexation
of Texas. Had Harrison lived, they would have heard no more of it to
this day. But no sooner was John Tyler installed into the President's
house than nullification, and Texas, and war with Mexico, rose again
upon the surface, with eye steadily fixed upon the polar star of
Southern slave-dealing supremacy in the government of the Union."

Mr. Adams then comments upon the history of the Santa Fe expedition,
which was fitted out in the summer of 1841, shortly after the accession
of Mr. Tyler, by the then President of Texas, having been originated and
concerted within these states, and carried on chiefly by citizens of the
United States. That it was known, countenanced, and encouraged, at the
presidential house, was, said Mr. Adams, more than questioned; for,
while it was on foot, and before it was known, frequent hints were given
in public journals, moved by Executive impulse, that at the coming
session the annexation of Texas was to be introduced by a citizen of the
highest distinction. "But the Texan expedition was ill-starred. Instead
of taking and rioting upon the beauty and booty of Santa Fe, they were
all captured themselves, without even the glory of putting a price on
their lives. They surrendered without firing a gun." The failure of this
expedition discomfited the war faction in Congress, and injured for a
moment, and only for a moment, the project to which Southern
nullification clung with the grasp of death.

Mr. Adams next proceeds to exhibit the evidence to show "the
participation of the administration at Washington with this incursion of
banditti from Texas against Santa Fe," and to explain "the legislative
exploit" by which the treasury of the United States was made to
contribute to "the dismemberment of Mexico, and the annexation of an
immense portion of its territory to the slave representation of the
Union." The internal evidence he regarded as irresistible that "the
expedition against Santa Fe was planned within your boundaries, and
committed to the execution of your citizens, under the shelter of
Mexican banners and commissions."

In the subsequent portion of this address Mr. Adams, regarding the
principles of nullification as being at the basis of Mr. Tyler's whole
policy, enters at large into its nature, and thus speaks of its origin
and association with democracy:

"Let me advert again to the important disclosure in the letter of
Mr. Appleton to his constituents, from which I have taken the
liberty of reading to you an extract. Nullification was generated
in the hot-bed of slavery. It drew its first breath in the land
where the meaning of the word democracy is that a majority of the
people are the goods and chattels of the minority; that more than
one half of the people are not men, women, and children, but
things, to be treated by their owners, not exactly like dogs and
horses, but like tables, chairs, and joint-stools; that they are
not even fixtures to the soil, as in countries where servitude is
divested of its most hideous features,--not even beings in the
mitigated degradation from humanity of beasts, or birds, or
creeping things,--but destitute not only of the sensibilities of
our own race of men, but of the sensations of all animated nature.
That is the native land of nullification, and it is a theory of
constitutional law worthy of its origin. _Democracy_, pure
democracy, has at least its foundation in a generous theory of
human rights. It is founded on the natural equality of mankind. It
is the corner-stone of the Christian religion. It is the first
_element_ of _all_ lawful government upon earth. Democracy is
self-government of the community by the conjoint will of the
majority of numbers. What communion, what affinity, can there be
between that principle and nullification, which is the despotism of
a corporation--unlimited, unrestrained, _sovereign_ power? Never,
never was amalgamation so preposterous and absurd as that of
nullification and democracy."

Of the hostility of nullification to the prosperity of the free states
he thus speaks:

"The root of the doctrine of nullification is that if the internal
improvement of the country should be left to the legislative
management of the national government, and the proceeds of the
sales of the public lands should be applied as a perpetual and
self-accumulating fund for that purpose, the blessings unceasingly
showered upon the people by this process would so grapple the
affections of the people to the national authority, that it would,
in process of time, overshadow that of the state governments, and
settle the preponderancy of power in the free states; and then the
undying worm of conscience twinges with terror for the fate of _the
peculiar institution_. Slavery stands aghast at the prospective
promotion of the general welfare, and flies to nullification for
defence against the energies of freedom, and the inalienable rights
of man."

After stating and commenting upon the policy of General Jackson, as
having for its object the "dismembering of Mexico, and restoring slavery
to Texas, and of surrounding the South with a girdle of slave states, to
eternize the blessings of the peculiar institution, and spread them like
a garment of praise over the whole North American Union," he explained
the effect of party divisions always operating in the United States, and
the character of the several proportions of their power. Their results,
in tending to revive and strengthen slavery and the slave-trade, which
Mr. Adams then foretold, excited melancholy anticipations in the mind of
every reflecting freeman. What was then prophecy is now history.

"There are two different party divisions always operating in the
House of Representatives of the United States,--one sectional,
North and South, or, in other words, slave and free; the other
political--both sides of which have been known at different times
by different names, but are now usually denominated Whigs and
Democrats. The Southern or slave party, outnumbered by the free,
are cemented together by a common, intense interest of property to
the amount of twelve hundred millions of dollars in human beings,
the very existence of which is neither allowed nor tolerated in the
North. It is the opinion of many theoretical reasoners on the
subject of government that, whatever may be its form, the ruling
power of every nation is its property. Mr. Van Buren, in one of his
messages to Congress, gravely pointed out to them the
anti-republican tendencies of associated wealth. Reflect now upon
the tendencies of twelve hundred millions of dollars of associated
wealth, directly represented in your national legislature by one
hundred members, together with one hundred and forty members
representing persons only--freemen, not chattels. Reflect, also,
that this twelve hundred millions of dollars of property is
peculiar in its character, and comes under a classification once
denominated by a Governor of Virginia _property acquired by crime_;
that it sits uneasy upon the conscience of its owner; that, in the
purification of human virtue, and the progress of the Christian
religion, it has become, and is daily becoming, more and more
odious; that Washington and Jefferson, themselves slaveholders,
living and dying, bore testimony against it; that it was the dying
REMORSE of John Randolph; that it is renounced and abjured by the
supreme pontiff of the Roman Church, abolished with execration by
the Mahometan despot of Tunis, shaken to its foundations by the
imperial autocrat of all the Russias and the absolute monarch of
Austria;--all, all bearing reluctant and extorted testimony to the
self-evident truth that, by the laws of nature and nature's God,
man cannot be the property of man. Recollect that the first cry of
human feeling against this unhallowed outrage upon human rights
came from ourselves--from the Quakers of Pennsylvania; that it
passed from us to England, from England to France, and spread over
the civilized world; that, after struggling for nearly a century
against the most sordid interests and most furious passions of man,
it made its way at length into the Parliament, and ascended the
throne, of the British Isles. The slave-trade was made piracy first
by the Congress of the United States, and then by the Parliament of
Great Britain.

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