Book Description

Excerpt from Letters From John Quincy Adams to His Constituents of the Twelfth Congressional District in Massachusetts: To Which Is Added His Speech in Congress, Delivered February 9, 1837 I considered, as I stated in my address of the Slst of January, the system of action of the House upon the abo lition petitions as settled for the remainder of the session. But between that and the next day for receiving petitions, Monday, the 6th of February, I received thirty petitions, among which were two which came to me by the mail, postmarked Fredericksburg, Virginia; one of them signed by nine names of women, in various hand-writing; some of them good, none of illiterate appearance. It prayed not for the abolition of slavery, but that. Congress would put a step to the slave-trade in the District of Columbia. It was accompanied by a letter signed by one of the names subscribed to the petition, requesting me to present it. The other purported to be from twenty-two slaves, sub scribed so as to have every appearance of being genuine; the first name being in a hand-writing not absolutely bad, and subscribed also alone to a letter requesting me to pre sent the petition. I believed the petition signed by female names to be genuine, and did not believe them to be names offree negroes or mulattoes; but had I known them to be such, that would not have deterred me from presenting it; the object of it being not only proper in itself, but lauda ble, and eminently fit for subscription by virtuous women of any color or complexion. I had suspicions that the other, purporting to be from slaves, came really from the hand of a master, who had prevailed on his slaves to sign it, that they might have the, appearance of imploring the members from the North to cease offering petitions for their emancipation, which could have no other tendency than to aggravate their servitude, and of being so impatient under the operation of petitions in their favor, as to pray that the northern members who should persist in present ing them should be expelled. Intimations of the same de sire had already been manifested in quarters very remote from servitude, and not even professors of servility. They had been seen in a newspaper of this city, professedly de voted to the pure coinage of democracy from the mint of Van, Buren and Rives, against the counterfeit currency of Benton and Amos Kendall. The Albany Argus itself, a paper known to be under the same infldences, had la mented that the Massachusetts madman should be permit ted, week after week, - to do what? To persist in presenting abolition petitions! This was the head and front of my offending; and for this alone, the petition from slaves, for my expulsion from the House, was but the echo of the distinct and explicit call from the Albany Argus and the Van Buren and Rives's Washingtonian. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.