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civilization to travel in that direction.
An historian calls this proposition, as moved by Seward in the Senate and by Corwin in the House, ‘an act of moral self-abasement on the part of the North.’1 The other proposition admitted New Mexico, altogether unripe for membership in the Union,2 although she had already in 1859 legalized slavery and adopted a barbarous slave code.3 Within two weeks Mr. Adams, however, voted in committee against his two propositions when they came up again for final action, justifying his change of position on the ground that they had not been accepted as satisfactory by the recusant States; but they were carried in the committee against his negative vote.4 Within three weeks from this action, he made a speech in the house, January 31, in which he returned to the support of the propositions he had offered and later rejected.5 In this speech he maintained the inability of Congress to prohibit slavery in the Territories in the face of the Dred Scott decision, although he had denied its validity in a public address at Philadelphia, in which he had assailed the Buchanan Administration for its efforts to palm off as law extra-judicial opinions of a slaveholding bench of judges.6 Mr. Adams, in letters to his constituents, treated as ‘an unrepealed and unrescinded contract’7 a clause of the Compromise of 1850 which provided for the admission of New Mexico with or without slavery, as its
1 Von Holst, vol. VII. p. 431.
2 New Mexico is not thought thirty and more years later to be fit for admission. Arizona, then included in her limits, is also still a Territory.
3 Von Holst, vol. VII. pp. 199, 227. The Boston Courier, holding an extreme Southern position, approved, February 2, Mr. Adams's propositions, saying: ‘It is certain that these propositions include the principle of everything for which the South has contended.’
4 Journal of the Committee of Thirty-three. New York Tribune, Dec. 30 and 31, 1860; New York Herald, December 31; New York Evening Post, Jan. 15. 1861.
5 Everett, Winthrop, and A. A. Lawrence, members of the Boston Union Committee, sat near Adams as he was speaking; and when he closed, Everett gave him congratulations and approval. Another hearer was Cassius M. Clay, who approved Adams's propositions in an address in Washington, January 26; New York Tribune, January 28. Adams in this speech indicated his disposition to abandon the personal liberty laws of the States. Everett approved the Crittenden Compromise in a letter to the author of it; but Winthrop's reply was guarded. Coleman's ‘Life’ of J. J. Crittenden, pp. 238, 239.
6 Adams, in a letter to F. W. Bird, Feb. 16, 1861, though regarding Judge Taney's opinion as a dictum, thought it sure to be adopted by the court. Lincoln's Administration, however, rejected it altogether, and treated negroes as citizens. Opinion of Edward Bates, Attorney-General; McPherson's ‘History of the Rebellion,’ p. 378; Sumner's Works, vol. v. pp. 497, 498.
7 Letter to E. L. Pierce, Jan. 1. 1861. Mr. Adams's action was reviewed by E. L. Pierce in the Boston ‘Atlas and Bee,’ Jan. 9, 1861; and the same journal published a leader, February 19, concerning it.
Cambridge, MA. Press of John Wilson and Son. 1877.
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