slavery,
not against, and that he had emphatically not offered it, but only made
an innocent inquiry of the Speaker about doing so, the proper answer to
which was so far from obvious that the Speaker himself had signified his
intention to take the sense of the House upon it. Regularly, year after
year, Adams moved the abolition of the gag rule, was beaten as
regularly, long as a matter of course, sometimes after heated debate in
which he was always victor. But little by little the majority vote
against him lessened. In 1842 the gag passed by but four votes, in 1843
it had a majority of three only, in 1844 his motion to strike it out was
carried by a vote of one hundred and eight to eighty. Adams wrote that
day in his diary: "Blessed, forever blessed be the name of God."

[1850]

But a plenitude of Whigs, not all southern, voted for each of these
gags. The worst one of all was moved by a Whig. The XXVIIth Congress,
strongly whig, voted to retain the gag, which it was left for the
XXVIIIth, strongly democratic, finally to repeal. At the South, slavery
more and more overbore party feeling. Said Dixon, a Kentucky Whig, in
1854, "Upon the question of slavery I know no Whiggery, no Democracy--I
am a pro-slavery man." It should be added, however, that as the
conflict progressed, pro-slavery Whigs became few save in the South, and
that these nearly all soon turned Democrats.

Most humiliating was the vassalage to the slave power displayed by
northern congressmen of both parties, though forming a majority in the
House during all the great days of the slavery battle. The gag history
is one example. Resolutions against unquestionably unconstitutional laws
imprisoning northern seamen at southern ports simply because they were
colored, were tabled in the House by a large majority. Slavery in the
District of Columbia, where Congress had the right of "exclusive
legislation in all cases whatsoever," so that the entire nation was
responsible, defied every effort to abolish it till 1862, after the
Civil War began. Nor was the trade there in aught alleviated till 1850,
when some modification of it was possible as an element of the
compromise described in the preceding chapter. An enlargement of
Missouri, adding to the northwest corner of that State, as slave
territory, a vast tract which the Missouri Compromise had forever
devoted to freedom, being in truth a preliminary repeal of that pact,
was carried without opposition.

The bruta