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Adams, John Quincy. Personal Diary. Adams Family Papers.
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.
Washington. Monday. 29 March 1841. [Five]
29. IV:30. Monday
Munroe, E.
Rain the greater part of the last night and of the day, with a chilling east wind
requiring a small fire in my chamber; just enough to be kept burning.
Mr. Munroe was a stranger from Boston, who brought a parcel for Elizabeth.
I completed the assortment and filing of my letters received since the beginning
of this year, and find myself with a task before me perfectly appalling . I am yet
to revise for publication my argument in the case of the Amistad Africans, and in
merely glancing over the Parliamentary slave trade papers lent me by Mr. Fox, I find
impulses of duty upon my own conscience which I cannot resist , while, on the other
hand, the magnitude, the danger, the insurmountable burden of labour to be encountered
in this undertaking to touch upon the slave trade. No one else will undertake it.
No one but a spirit unconquerable by man, woman or friend, can undertake it, but
with the heart of martyrdom. The world, the flesh and all the devils in hell are
arrayed against any man, who now, in this North American union shall dare to join
the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave trade - and what can I,
upon the verge of my seventy-fourth birthday, with a shaking hand, a darkening eye,
a drowsy brain, and with all my faculties dropping from me, one by one, as the teeth
are dropping from my head, what can I do for the cause of God and man? for the progress
of human emancipation? for the suppression of the African slave trade? Yet my conscience
presses me on. Let me but die upon the breach.
I walked about half an hour for exercise before dinner, and called at the house of
Mr. S. H. Fox, the British Minister, to have some conversation with him. It was 2
o’clock P.M. The servant at the door told me that he was not up, and that he was
unwell. I enquired at what time he was usually visible. He said between three and
four. I had heard that his usual hour of rising was three. In my second walk after
dinner I met Mr. Jesse D. Miller, first auditor of the Treasury; from which office
it is said he is to retire at the close of the present month and quarter. This evening
I answered an old and repeated invitation to deliver a lecture at Richmond, Virginia;
and postponed answering the letters received last evening from the Amistad Committee,
and from Lewis Tappan. I read Judge Betts’s opinion upon the 14th section of the
Tariff Act of July 1832, and the reversal of his decision by Judge Thompson. And
I made several minutes from the Parliamentary slave trade papers, Class A., 1839-40,
showing the enormous extent to which that trade was in [those] and the two preceding
years, carried on in American vessels under the patronage of N. P. Trist.
