or courtesy.  Not even a gallant like John Quincy Adams, who was able to see nothing attractive in the little band of reformers.  They seemed to him, in fact, “a small, shallow, and enthusiastic party preaching the abolition of slavery upon the principles of extreme democracy.”  If Mr. Adams had little love for the South, he had none whatever for the Abolitionists.  By no stretch of the imagination could he have been suspected of any sentimental attachment to the Abolition movement.  For his unvarying attitude towards it was one of grim contempt.  But if the old Roman had no love for the Abolitionists, he did have a deep-seated attachment and reverence for certain ancient rights appertaining to free institutions, which nothing was able to shake.  Among these was the great right of petition, viewed by the ex-President as a right of human nature.  For a dozen years he stood in Congress its sleepless sentinel.  And herein did he perform for freedom most valiant service.  It made no difference to the dauntless old man whether he approved of the prayer of a petition or not, if it was sent to him he presented it to the House all the same.  He presented petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and one, at least, against it, petitions from black and white, bond and free, with superb fidelity to the precious right which he championed.

This characteristic of the aged statesman kept the Southern members in a state of chronic apprehension and excitement.  They bullied him, they raged like so many wild animals against him, they attempted to crush him with votes of censure and expulsion all to no purpose.  Then they applied the gag:  “That all petitions, memorials, and papers touching the abolition of slavery, or the buying, selling, or transferring slaves, in any State, or district, or territory of the United States, be laid on the table without being debated, printed, read, or referred, and that no action be taken thereon.”  Mr. Adam’s denunciation of this action as a violation of the Constitution, of the right of the people to petition, and of the right to freedom of speech in Congress, found wide echo through the North.  The violence, intolerence, and tyranny of the South were disgusting many of the most intelligent and influential minds in the non-slave-holding States, and driving them into more or less close affiliation with the anti-slavery movement.

And so it was wherever one turned there were conflict and uproar.  Everywhere contrary ideas, interests, institutions, tendencies, were colliding with inextinguishable rage.  All the opposites and irreconcilables in a people’s life had risen and clashed together in a death struggle for mastery.  Freedom and slavery, civilization and barbarism had found an Armageddon in the moral consciousness of the Republic.  Now the combatants rallied and the battle thickened at one point, now around another.  At Washington the tide rolls in with resounding fury about the right of petition and the freedom of debate, then through the free States it surges and beats around the right of free speech and the freedom of the press.  Storm clouds are flying from the East and from the West, flying out of the North and out of the South.  Everywhere the chaos of the winds has burst, and the anarchy of the “live thunder.”