Former President, John Quincy Adams is 75 Years Old, Angry, and has Nothing to Lose. So he Uses his Final Political Publication to Rail against Racism in Texas and American Hypocrisy with Respect to Slavery.

John Quincy Adams was at this point one of the most remarkable figures in American political history. Having already served as the sixth President of the United States (1825–1829), he had returned to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives, an almost unheard-of reversal in status. He was 75 years old when this address was delivered, yet was still one of the most combative and consequential figures in Washington.

Published just 6 years before his death, this was former President Adams’ final political statement and publication. And he’s still got it!

The text is brimful of memorable passages. The most striking is his dissection of the Texas Constitution. He describes how the Texan republic, upon declaring independence from Mexico in 1836, immediately reinstated slavery (which Mexico had abolished), then proceeds to describe its outrages:

"It excluded all Africans, and descendants of Africans and Indians, from the name, rights and privileges of citizens, forever; interdicted the very entrance into the State of any free colored persons, without the consent of the Legislature; prohibited forever the admission of Africans or Negroes into the Republic, except from the United States of America, and declared it piracy, without affixing any penalty to the commission of the crime."

He then proceeds to the most biting passage of document, noting that the Texas Declaration of Rights, unlike the slaveholding American constitutions it was modeled on, at least had the honesty not to proclaim the equality of all men:

"This declaration embodies all the usual guards for the protection of liberty, but it [at least] avoids the base hypocrisy of declaring the equality of rights of all men, which pollutes some of our slavery-sullied Constitutions."

That phrase, "slavery-sullied Constitutions," applied by a former President to the founding documents of American states, in a printed and widely circulated address, is remarkable for its directness.

Finally, he riffs on the financial frenzy surrounding Texas independence, produces a darkly comic list of adverbial phrases, describing the plague of profiteers as being "Land-jobbing, Stock-jobbing, Slave-jobbing, Rights of Man-jobbing, . . . all hand in hand, sweeping over the land like a hurricane."

And from the welcoming speech by Mr. Davis, there is a passage that captures the political steadfastness of Adams. He is praised as someone who, amid "insults, abuse and obloquy, the fiercest fury of Southern invective, in the wildest of the storm, breasting the mad lashings of the waves, has stood, a watch-tower upon a benighted coast, to illumine, to cheer, and to save."

Adams is not just opposing slavery as a moral abstraction, but tracing its political machinery in concrete detail, the manipulation of Mexico, the covert organization of the Texas revolt, the corruption of neutrality laws, and the drafting of a constitution explicitly designed to expand and entrench slavery westward. It reads less like a political speech and more like a prosecutor's brief.

Adams, John Quincy. Address of John Quincy Adams, to His Constituents of the Twelfth Congressional District, at Braintree, September 17th, 1842. Reported Originally for the Boston Atlas. Boston. J. H. Eastburn, Printer. 1842. 63pp.

Good +, no wraps. Textually clean. Removed from a sammelband at some point with flotsam at spine as usual. A bit tender.