John Quincy Adams
Congressman, Advocate
John Quincy Adams was 74 years old when he appeared before the Supreme Court on behalf of the Amistad Africans -- in the twilight of a long, remarkable public career. He had entered the budding U.S. foreign service 60 years before as a young teenager, taking up a post as secretary to the U.S. Minister of Russia. From this diplomatic apprenticeship Adams went on to postings as U.S. minister to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia and England, as well as part of the American Peace Commission that negotiated the end of the War of 1812. These tours of duty abroad Adams punctuated with domestic positions and politics, including stints as Massachusetts State Senator, U.S. Senator and, under President Monroe, U.S. Secretary of State. In 1824, his public career culminated -- or seemed to culminate -- in Adams's election to the Presidency.
Defeated for re-election in 1828, Adams retired briefly, but chafed at his
isolation and inactivity. As he himself would admit late in his life, "incessant
active intercourse with the world has made political movement to me as much a necessary
of life as atmospheric air..." So in 1831 Adams re-entered public life as the
U.S. Representative for the Plymouth district of Massachusetts. He held this seat
for 17 years, until his death in 1848.
Before the 1830s, Adams spent little political energy opposing slavery. In fact, as a diplomat he had supported the claims of American slaveowners trying to recover slaves who escaped into foreign countries -- meaning that he took positions much like those adopted by the Spanish authorities in the Amistad case. In 1822, when the British tried to persuade then Secretary of State Adams to allow British naval patrols search American vessels suspected of slave trading, Adams resisted. A British minister pressed, asking Adams (as he recorded in his diary) "if I could conceive of a greater and more atrocious evil than this slave-trade. I said, Yes: admitting the right of search by foreign officers of our vessels upon the seas in time of peace; for that would be making slaves of ourselves."
But late in his political career, as a Congressman over the 1830s, Adams increasingly identified himself with antislavery politics. He gained notoriety, and considerable acclaim in his native New England, for opposing the "gag rule" that prevented Congress from receiving abolitionist petitions. Adams took on the gag rule repeatedly, staging a series of confrontations in which he performed with parliamentary acumen and dramatic flourish
Amistad: Adams threw himself into the Amistad case with characteristic vigor. During the period from November 1840-January 1841 he was everywhere, all over Washington, declaiming, networking, nosing around for new evidence, poring over the documents he dug out of the executive departments. He prepared and fretted over his legal arguments for the court. Above all, he seems to have relished the opportunity to attack and expose the Van Buren Administration, which he became convinced had conspired to influence the judicial outcome of the case. His arguments before the Supreme Court did little, in the end, to influence the ruling: Justice Story's decision took up the points made by Adams's colleague, Roger Baldwin. Still Adams's spirited defense made strong points, galvanized abolitionist sentiment, and helped to damage Van Buren's credibility.
Fred Dalzell
Further Reading: Adams is a strong personality, and he tends to rub historians one way or the other. His most recent biographer, Paul Nagel, in John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life (1997), conveys a skeptical distaste for his subject, and describes the antislavery conviction of Adams's later political career as a search for a cause to embrace. On the other side, Leonard Richards is more sympathetic, offering a fine account of Adams's years in Congress, in The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
But the best source on Adams is still Adams himself -- meaning the meticulous
diary he kept all his life,
filled with daily information, political gossip, cantankerous opinion, and melodramatic
soul searching.
Documents: In addition to the diary, the "Exploring Amistad" Library
includes an early
letter from Adams commenting on the case (published by the Journal of Commerce).
Adams published an extended
version of the Supreme Court argument that ran to 135 pages in its original form.
