and unity in politics; and at the apotheosis of the will of the numerical majority, without regard to the political rights of a community as organized under established government. It is philanthropic rather than patriotic. It moves to its ends through paths of destruction; and always terminates by an inevitable recoil of society to save itself from anarchy in a military despotism.

Abolition now knocked at the doors of Congress for admission. It selected Mr. Adams to present its wishes to the Federal Legislature. On the 12th day of December, 1831, it being the second week of the first session of the Twenty-Second Congress, he presented fifteen petitions, all numerously signed, from sundry citizens of Pennsylvania, praying for the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade in the District of Columbia. At this time abolition was considered so odious a fanaticism, that Mr. Adams did not venture to advocate the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. He thought Congress might legislate on the slave-trade in the District. Year after year Mr. Adams continued to present the petitions of the abolitionists from New England and other States. The Southern States were, at this time, oppressed by the high tariff; and were threatening nullification. Every possible means were used to excite the free States against the slave States, and also to incite the slaves against their masters. The spirit of the agita

tion is exemplified in the extracts which I have given from Mr. Gruber's sermon. Yet Mr. Adams stood forth in the House of Representatives, under the pretext of guarding the right of petition, the fomentor of discord between the two great sections of the country. All discreet men abhorred the purposes of the abolitionists. In order, if possible, to stop the nefarious agitation, the House of Representatives, in May, 1836, by a large majority, passed the following resolution:

"Resolved, That all petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatever, to the subject of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid upon the table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon."

The resolution only gave Mr. Adams the position of one seemingly defending the right of petition, and it roused his perverse nature to a more determined purpose. The petitions now came to him in such numbers that he sometimes presented two hundred a day. He was, with all his might, fomenting sectional strife. He turned his back upon the Missouri compromise; and when, on the 13th of June, ..1836, the bill for the admission of Arkansas as a State was before the House of Representatives, he offered this amendment, saying he wished it to be inserted in italics: "And nothing in this Act shall be construed as an assent by Congress to the article in the Consti

tution of the said State, in relation to slavery or the emancipation of slaves, etc." He, with the other abolitionists, voted against the admission of the State. Arkansas was within the territory where slavery was allowed by the Missouri compromise. Mr. Adams was bent upon agitating the question of slavery, with the hope that it would tear up the institution by the roots. He was now the great leader of New England radicalism. He felt happy in his power of mischief. Strife had always been his delight. And a peculiar zest was given to the present contest, as it was with those who had dismissed both his father and himself from power the people of the Southern States. In this work of discord, on the 25th of February, 1839, he proposed, in the House of Representatives, the following amendments to the Constitution of the United States:

"Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress assembled, two-thirds of both Houses concurring therein, That the following amendments to the Constitution of the United States be proposed to the several States of the Union, which, when ratified by three-fourths of the Legislatures of the said States, shall become and be a part of the Constitution of the United States:

"1. From and after the 4th day of July, 1842, there shall be throughout the United States no hereditary slavery; but on and after that day every child born within the United States, their territories or jurisdiction, shall be born free.

"2. With the exception of the territory of Florida, there shall henceforth never be admitted into this Union any State the Constitution of which shall tolerate within the same the existence of slavery.

"3. From and after the 4th of July, 1845, there shall be neither slavery nor slave-trade at the seat of Government of the United States."

The course of Mr. Adams greatly encouraged the abolitionists in their work of mischief. The Legislatures of Massachusetts and Vermont approved his course, and pledged him their support. Large bodies of people in the Eastern, Northern, and Middle States gave him their pledges of co-operation in his work of aggression. Mr. Adams was now the hero of an agitation pregnant with civil war.

In order to justify a course so perilous to the peace of the country, Mr. Adams conceived a new theory of the Constitution of the United States. He had been invited, by the New York Historical Society, to deliver a discourse on the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington as President of the United States. This he did on the 30th of April, 1839, two months after he had proposed his amendments to the Constitution of the United States abolishing slavery. In his discourse he asserted that, by the Declaration of Independence, the inhabitants of the Colonies became one people, and that the rights proclaimed were "the natural rights of mankind." That

the Articles of Confederation, in which it was declared "each State retains its sovereignty," were a usurpation, by the Legislatures of the several States and their delegates in Congress, upon the rights of the people of the United States constituting one blended community. And that afterwards the Articles of Confederation were abolished, and the people reclaimed their rights, and in their own name, we the people," ordained and established the Constitution of the United States upon the principles of the Declaration of Independence proclaiming "the natural rights of mankind." If it were true that the Constitution of the United States was founded upon "the natural rights of mankind," and not upon the separate rights of the respective peoples of the different States, then his proposed amendments were no breach of the implied faith to the South, but only a measure carrying out the principles of the Constitution. But when, as is seen in the first part of this chapter, the Declaration of Independence was at once published in the same newspaper, in Massachusetts, with advertisements for the sale of negro slaves, and that the slave-trade from Africa was tolerated until 1808, increasing the number of slaves in the States, and the right to catch fugitive slaves everywhere was guaranteed by the Constitution, and the Federal Government was established in slave territory, it becomes manifest that Mr. Adams's theory of the Federal Constitution is an