te.

From this time forward anti-slavery progress was more marked. The
struggle over the right of petition in Congress continued, and was
characterized by a constantly increasing measure of fierceness on
the part of the South. This is vividly depicted in a passage from
the diary of Mr. Adams, in March, 1841, in which he declares that
"The world, the flesh, and all the devils in hell are arrayed
against any man who now, in this North American Union, shall dare
to join the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave
trade; and what can I, upon the verge of my seventy-fourth birthday,
with a shaking hand, a darkening eye, a drowsy brain, and with all
my faculties dropping from me one by one as the teeth are dropping
from my head, what can I do for the cause of God and man, for the
progress of human emancipation, for the suppression of the African
slave-trade? Yet my conscience presses me on; let me but die upon
the breach."

The celebrated trial of Mr. Adams the following year, for presenting
a petition from the citizens of Haverhill, requesting Congress to
take steps toward a peaceable dissolution of the Union, was a great
national event, and his triumph gave a new impulse to the cause of
freedom. The censure of Mr. Giddings which followed, for offering
resolutions in the House embodying the simplest truisms respecting
the relations of the General Government to slavery, and the elaborate
State paper of Mr. Webster, which provoked these resolutions, in
which he attempted to commit the Government to the protection of
slavery on the high seas, in accordance with the theories of Mr.
Calhoun, still further kept alive the anti-slavery agitation, and
awakened the interest of Northern men. A kindred aid, unwittingly
rendered the anti-slavery cause, was the infamous diplomacy of
General Cass, our Ambassador to France in 1842, in connection with
the Quintuple Treaty for the suppression of the African slave trade.
His monstrous effort to shield that trade under the flag of the
United States was characterized by Mr. Adams as "a compound of
Yankee cunning, of Italian perfidy, and of French _legerete_,
cemented by shameless profligacy unparalleled in American diplomacy."
In October, 1842, Henry Clay himself became an anti-slavery agitator
through his famous "Mendenhall Speech" at Richmond, Indiana. In
response to a petition asking him to emancipate his slaves, he told
the people "that whatever the law secures as pro