"John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery," David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason

 Even as slavery has been gone a hundred and sixty-two years in the United States, race continues an unresolved issue. Perhaps that is because we conflate morality with democracy – that the latter should reflect the former. Voter interference, whether disallowing eligible voters or allowing ineligible voters, is what destroys democracy, not the election of a candidate disliked by those who comprise the establishment, or any other group.

 

Democracy is amoral; it manifests the will of the people, for good or for bad. In the 19^th Century, property ownership, gender and racial limits on voting meant the will of all the people was not fully represented. Today, those limits have been largely removed. However, a new problem confronts us – illiteracy and innumeracy are on the rise, as seen in falling IQ rates, not just in the U.S., but in much of the West. Blame for the decline can largely be attributed the rise in social media, the introduction of the smart phone, and a reduction in the number of people who read books. “Democracy,” Walter Russell Mead wrote in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, “is about self-government, not good government.” The fact that our democracy has been a good government for people over 235 year speaks to the wisdom of the people, not, as Mead wrote, “the pretentions of…a self-regarding elite.”

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery:

Selections from the Diary

David Waldstreicher & Matthew Mason

May 24, 2025

 

“But my cause is the cause of my country and of human liberty. It is the

cause of Christian improvement, the fulfilment of the prophecies that the day

shall come when slavery and war shall be banished from the face of the earth.”

                                                                                                The Diaries of John Quincy Adams 1779-1848

                                                                                                November 12, 1842

 

This fascinating history traces the arc of John Quincy Adams’ gradual attitudinal shift toward slavery. He always saw it as evil and alien to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution, but he feared the effect of its extinction on the nation. As Lincoln expressed in an August 22, 1862 letter to Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, Adams felt his paramount duty was to preserve the Union. 

 

In 21^st Century United States – even when slave-like conditions still persist in parts of the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and in Uyghur-occupied China – it is easy to forget that slavery has been the norm, not the exception, for most of human history. Allegedly, it was Helen Keller who once wrote: “There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”

 

Adams’ diaries provide a unique perspective on late 18^th Century and first-half 19^th Century American attitudes toward slavery. His diaries began in 1779 when he was twelve and off to France with his father. They continued until 1848 when he died at age eighty. Besides being the nation’s 6^th President, Adams served as ambassador to Russia and Great Britian. He was a U.S. Senator and James Monroe’s Secretary of State. Following his four years as President, he represented Massachusetts for seventeen years in the House of Representatives. This book is limited to those parts of the diary dealing with slavery.

 

Early on, Adams had to set aside his abomination for slavery for his interest in concluding the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1804 and for the acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1819, both of which meant both acceptance and expansion of slavery. He saw Britain as hypocritical, in making illegal the slave trade, while still impressing American merchant seamen into their navy during peacetime. He questioned the project to remove free African Americans to West Africa by members of the American Colonization Society, suspicious of motives; while some acted humanely, others were “weak-minded men,” and/or “speculators in [pursuit of] official profits and honors.”

 

On December 27, 1819 Adams wrote of Thomas Jefferson, “one of the great men whom this country has produced.” He added, though, that in his Declaration of Independence Jefferson did “not appear to have been aware that it also laid open a precipice into which the slave-holding planters of this country sooner or later must fall.” On February 24, 1820 he wrote: “Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union…” Yet he supported the Missouri Compromise that same year, which maintained a balance between slave and free states. Of Stratford Canning, British Ambassador to the United States, Adams wrote on June 29, 1822: “He asked 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 officials of our vessels upon the seas in time of peace.”

 

Adams was fearful that slavery would sever the Union, writing pessimistically on July 30, 1834: “My hopes of the long continuance of this Union are extinct.” On November 10, 1838, he wrote in response to upstate New York abolitionists: “I am not for the immediate abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia or the Territory of Florida; but I am for the abolition of slavery in both.” In March 1841, Adams, at the behest of abolitionists, represented the captives of the Amistad. He won their release to return to their homes in Sierra Leone.

 

On August 10, 1843, Adams wrote: “Before my lamp is burnt out,  I am desirous that my opinions concerning the great movement throughout the civilized world for the abolition of slavery should be explicitly avowed and declared.” While it would be almost twenty years – and fifteen years after John Quincy Adams’ death – before President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1,1863, Professors Waldstreicher and Mason have allowed readers to witness Mr. Adams evolving attitude toward the evil of slavery.