With this post, a set of companion pages, Rebellion Documents, is launched, intended to provide background material to augment that which is published in this blog.
Mr. Adams’ May 31, 1860 speech is the first document in Rebellion Documents.
As a junior member of the United States House of Representatives, Charles Francis Adams, the grandson of President John Adams and the son of President John, was not a regular speaker on the floor before his speech, “The Republican Party a Necessity.”
In this, his maiden session, except in answer to the call of the clerk, Mr. Adams’s voice was heard but once in the House. He would have preferred to maintain an unbroken silence; nut a presidential election was impending, and set speeches were in order. These speeches, of the abstract, educational kind, while addressed to the House, were meant for the constituencies. Some of Mr. Adams’s friends at home insisted that he must make himself heard; and in response to their urgency, he spoke. His speech was thoroughly characteristic. In no way sensational or vituperative, – it’s calm, firm tone, excellent temper and well-ordered reasoning naturally commended it to an audience satiated by months of turgid rhetoric and personal abuse. This his Southern colleagues appreciated; for, conscious what sinners they were in those respects, they the more keenly felt in others moderation of language and restraint in bearing. A few days later one of the most extreme among them, Mr. Cobb, of Alabama, went out of his way to refer to Mr. Adams as “the only member never out of order;” and the person thus curiously singled out noted,”there is something singular in the civility formally paid me on the other side of the house. I have never courted one of them; but I have insulted no one.” It was to these men – the members from the South, and more especially to those from Virginia – that Mr. Adams now addressed himself, setting forth the cause of being – the raison d’être – of the Republican party in a natural resistance to the requirements and claims of a property interest, which, alone of all interests, was directly represented on the floor of the House by a solid phalanx of its members. Then passing on to an appeal from the modern interpretation of the Declaration and Constitution to the understanding of the framers, he closed with a direct statement of the of the constitutional limits as respects slavery recognized and accepted by the Republican party, and his own belief in the utter futility and foreordained failure of any attempt on the Union.
Adams’ closing statement from The Republican Party a Necessity:
The party thus associated has no purposes which it seeks to conceal. It harbors no hostile designs against the rights of any of the States. Its leading idea is reform, total and fundamental, in the spirit in which the Government has of late years been administered — reform, also, in the details, which appear of late to have been suffered to run into many grave abuses. It is not to be concealed, that all over the country there is a well-defined impression that, for the sake of retaining power, corruption has been tolerated, if not actively encouraged, in high places; and the various efforts at investigation made within a few years, so far from removing that uneasiness, have gone far to increase it. Without undertaking to judge of the truth or the error at the bottom of the feeling, I do yet maintain that, for the honor of the country and of all who may be concerned in the administration of the Government, there is an overruling necessity for a complete change of the persons now responsible for its direction. The reform must be wide enough to restore freedom as the guide of the Federal policy, and to pull down the idol which has usurped her throne. It must be deep enough to reinstate honesty above suspicion in the dispensation of the pecuniary contracts incident to the possession of great place. If the execution of such a policy as this constitutes good ground for a resort to extreme measures of resistance by any portion of the people of these States, then is there no hope of further harmony in America; for the evils which would ensue to us, if we were deterred from action by such considerations, would be far more fatal to the public peace and prosperity, in the ultimate result, than any which could grow out of perseverance against unreasonable demands. Once more may the words of the great Roman patriots be appealed to: “Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.”[2]
And the remedy is secession, or, in plainer words, a dissolution of the Union and a disruption of the Constitution! So we are told. In a word, the people who defy us to put the negro out of this Hall; who claim that, by virtue of that negro, twenty of their number stand upon this floor; who hold a majority of the seats on the bench of the Supreme Court; who have time out of mind wielded in their own favor the executive influence of the Federal Government, imagine that they are about to better their condition by abandoning all these enormous privileges, and by setting up another Government, without any similar advantages, among themselves. Perhaps there might be some plausibility in this idea, if you could fence yourselves all round with a high wall, and proclaim a complete non-intercourse with the world outside. But the day for these fancies is passing off, even with the Chinese and the Japanese, who have held to them the longest. Your slaves will not be made safer at home, or less aggressive when abroad, by the withdrawal of the power of reclamation; neither will your internal condition be less an object of anxiety to your neighbors than it is now. The mere fact of the existence or the non-existence of a common bond of government may modify, but it cannot materially change, the conditions of your great social problem. If the Constitution were expunged by agreement to-morrow, its difficulties might, indeed, be aggravated, but, trust me, not one of them would be removed.
Whatever we may choose to think or say of one another, either for good or evil, a higher Power above us has raised up on this continent a people, who, whether united or divided, whether praying or cursing, whether loving or fighting, are destined to remain, in all the essential features of religion, language, thought, feeling, habits, customs, and manners, one and the same. Whatever seriously touches the condition of one portion of us, does and will have its effect upon the rest. In spite of all efforts to the contrary, there is and will be a common sympathy, having its root in that universal principle, a simple allusion to which, by a great dramatist of antiquity, is said to have instantaneously elicited a burst of enthusiasm from the thousands who crowded the Roman theatre — “I am a man; nothing that touches men can fail to move me.” Do you say that you can and will resist all this; that you will shut yourselves up at home, and see no more of the light of reason than is consistent with the preservation of what you are pleased to denominate your property? Then try it a while, if you are mad enough to be bent on the experiment. But permit me to predict, at this time, THAT IT WILL INNOMINIOUSLY FAIL. You cannot separate from us, unless you can blot from your memory all the traces of a common descent, a common literature, social affinities cemented by the dearest ties, and of a common faith. The violent men who are counselling this extreme policy, and in whom you now put your trust, will not retain their hold upon your confidence, when you open your eyes to the consequences of their work, and to the causes which they assign in their justification. It may then be too late entirely to repair the damage; but, whether late or early, you shall not have it to say, that there was not at least one voice, however humble, among those of your fancied opponents, which did not warn you of the folly of throwing off friends and fellow-citizens, only because they preferred to follow the doctrines taught by your and their fathers, rather than to desert them in your company. CHOOSE YE, WHERE YOU WILL GO. AS FOR US, WE WILL ADHERE TO THE ANCIENT FAITH.
[1] We invite you to no quarrel; but we set a higher value on our own liberty than on your friendship.
[2] The voice of menace has no power with freemen.
Sources:
Charles Francis Adams, by his son, Charles Francis Adams, Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York, copyright 1900
The Republican Party a Necessity, Speech of Charles Frances Adams of Massachusetts, Delivered in the House of Representatives, May 31, 1860.
