Late American Statesmen, No. II [pp. 95-119]

LA TE AMERICAN S TA TESMEN.
The demon of slavery agitation, menacing as it did all his
future, was thus to be driven from his path; yet this was not
without compunction. Thus under the date of March 3, the
day after the compromise was perfected in the House, he writes:
" I have favored this Missouri compromise, believing it to be all that
could have effected under the circumstances, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union to hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser
and a bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri until it
should have terminated in a convention of the States to revise and amend the
constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States, unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to
effect; namely, that of rallying to their standard the other States by the universal emancipation of their slaves."
Such, indeed, might have been the result, and this without
war, had a dissolution, as proposed by leading men of both
sides, been then effected through the medium of a constitutional
convention. In ten years the slaves in the border Southern
States would either have been sent farther south or would have
escaped north. Then a new belt of border States would have
been established, to be soon, by the same necessities, freed from
its slaves. Slavery would in this way be, in the nature of things,
extinguished through the whole of the old Union, and the old
Union, with no paramount social issue to divide it, would be
restored in a harmony it had never before known. But in the
way of Mr. Adams's acceptance of this view there were difficulties. In the first place, his long services in the Union had
attached him to it; he knew all about it; it knew all about him.
In the second place, what would he, a civilian, do in a country
which for some time to come would be involved, if not in war,
in constant preparation for war? His passion was public life,
and he must take public life in the only way he could. The
Union must be maintained and the slave issue sequestered.
But the slave issue would not be sequestered. It was continually breaking loose and throwing itself in Mr. Adams's path.
On May 24, I824, Mr. McDuffie visited Mr. Adams to sound
him as to what, if elected to the presidency, would be his course
in respect to the questions in which the South was most interested. Mr. Adams gave answers in respect to the tariff with
which Mr. McDuffie "appeared well satisfied;" from which, as
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