This, ostensibly, was deemed a pious act, and a discharge of a pious duty, when, in truth, the only motive was to take his home and country, and appropriate it to their own people.  It seems almost impossible to the race to come squarely up to truth and honesty, in word or act, in any transaction, as a man or as a people.  Sinister and subtle, expediency, and not principle, seems to be their universal rule of action.  Cold and passionless, incapable of generous emotions, he is necessarily vindictive and cruel.  Patient and persevering, bigoted and selfish, eschewing as a crime an honorable resentment, he creeps to his ends like a serpent, with all his cunning and all his venom.

John Quincy Adams, in his nature, was much more like his mother than his father.  His features were those of his mother, and the cold, persevering hatred of his nature was hers.  From his boyhood he was in the habit of recording, for future use, the most confidential conversations of his friends, as also all that incautiously fell from an occasional interview with those less intimate.  Had this been done for future reference only to establish facts in his own mind, there could have been no objection to the act; but this was not the motive.  These memoranda were to rise up in vengeance when necessary to gratify his spleen or vengeance.  He was naturally suspicious.  He gave no man his confidence, and won the friendship of no one.  Malignant and unforgiving, he watched his opportunity, and never failed to gratify his revengeful nature, whenever his victim was in his power.  The furtive wariness of his small gray eye, his pinched nose, receding forehead, and thin, compressed lips, indicated the malignant nature of his soul.  Unfaithful to friends, and only constant in selfishness—­unconscious of obligation, and ungrateful for favors—­fanatical only in hatred—­pretending to religious morality, yet pursuing unceasingly, with merciless revenge, those whom he supposed to be his enemies, he combined all the elements of Puritan bigotry and Puritan hate in devilish intensity.  He deserted the Federal party in their greatest need, and meanly betrayed them to Mr. Jefferson, whom, from his boyhood, he had hated and reviled in doggerel rhymes and the bitterest prose his genius could suggest.

The conduct of Mr. Adams, after he had been President, as the representative of Massachusetts in Congress, is the best evidence of the motives which influenced his conduct in the matter of these two treaties.  He never lost an opportunity to assail the interests and the institutions of the South.  He hated her, and to him, more than to any other, is due the conduct of the Northern people toward the South which precipitated the late war, and has destroyed the harmony once existing between the people.

His father had been repudiated by the South for a more trusted son of her own.  This was a treasured hatred; and when he shared his father’s fate, this became the pervading essence of his nature.