On March 3, 1820, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Secretary of War John Calhoun walked down Pennsylvania Avenue after a cabinet meeting devoted to Missouri’s application to be admitted to the Union as a slave state—a question that had begun to divide the country.
Adams had insisted that the words of the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—should be construed to prohibit slavery. Calhoun bluntly told him that in South Carolina, where he came from, those words were understood to apply only to white men.
That night, in his diary, Adams recorded the exchange then wrote: “The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this discussion is that the bargain between Freedom and Slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious.”
This was an astonishing conclusion for Adams to reach. He had known and revered all the Founders, including of course his father. He regarded the Constitution as the secular bible of the Republic. He had accepted the “bargain” as the price required to gain the consent of the South. Now, suddenly, he could not.
Adams, our sixth president, is not much known today. Readers of Profiles in Courage may recall the passage in which John F. Kennedy cites Adams’ willingness to defy his own party and constituents in the name of principle as the incarnation of “political courage.” Yet to me, a biographer of Adams, nothing is finer than the moment in which Adams surrenders to a truth that felt cataclysmic in its consequences. The expression for that is “intellectual courage.”
Adams kept this very inconvenient truth to himself for long years after 1820. He did not speak about slavery when he ran for president in 1824 nor during his time in office. But then he returned to Washington as a member of the House, the only former president to have done so, before or since. Because the Constitution had been silent on slavery, the issue had been left to the states and thus had not been a matter for congressional debate. But in 1835 abolitionist activists began to petition Congress to end the slave trade, or to ban it in the District of Columbia, both of which it could do. Very few Northern legislators would present those petitions. Adams did.
The great debate over slavery thus took place through the proxy of petitions. The slaveholders passed a “gag rule” prohibiting the presentation of all petitions on this and only this subject. Adams raged against the rule and did everything in his power to subvert it.
Twice, in 1837 and again in 1842, Southern lawmakers tried to censure Adams; both times he left them groaning in defeat.
Adams proved to be not only fearless in defense of principle, as Kennedy later wrote, but fearless in pursuing the logic of his own ideas. Because he understood that slavery would end only with war but could not in fact accept that “calamitous and desolating” outcome, he refused to close ranks with the abolitionists, to their unending frustration. On the other hand, he could not accept the constitutional bargain, and he spoke publicly of his view that the Declaration of Independence superseded the Constitution as America’s founding document. This premise would ultimately be adopted by Abraham Lincoln, who dissolved slavery in the name of the principles of the Declaration.
Political courage came naturally to Adams. We owe him a great debt of gratitude.
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James Traub is author of John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit.