himself to the Court of Russia in the Presidency of Mr. (p. 190)
Madison. But now vehement assaults were made upon the President,
alike in the Senate and in the House, on the utterly absurd ground
that he had transcended his powers. Incredible, too, as it may seem at
this day it was actually maintained that there was no occasion
whatsoever for the United States to desire representation at such a
gathering. Prolonged and bitter was the opposition which the
Administration was compelled to encounter in a measure to which there
so obviously ought to have been instant assent if considered solely
upon its intrinsic merits, but upon which nevertheless the discussion
actually overshadowed all other questions which arose during the
session. The President had the good fortune to find the powerful aid
of Mr. Webster enlisted in his behalf, and ultimately he prevailed;
but it was of ill augury at this early date to see that personal
hostility was so widespread and so rancorous that it could make such a
prolonged and desperate resistance with only the faintest pretext of
right as a basis for its action. Yet a great and fundamental cause of
the feeling manifested lay hidden away beneath the surface in the
instinctive antipathy of the slaveholders to Mr. Adams and all his
thoughts, his ways, and his doings. For into this question of (p. 191)
countenancing the Panama Congress, slavery and "the South" entered and
imported into a portion of the opposition a certain element of
reasonableness and propriety in a political sense. When we see the
Southern statesmen banded against President Adams in these debates, as
we know the future which was hidden from them, it almost makes us
believe that their vindictiveness was justified by an instinctive
forecasting of his character and his mission in life, and that without
knowing it they already felt the influence of the acts which he was
yet to do against them. For the South, without present dread of an
abolition movement, yet hated this Panama Congress with a contemptuous
loathing not alone because the South American states had freed all
slaves within their limits, but because there was actually a fair
chance that Hayti would be admitted to representation at the sessions
as a sovereign state. That the President of the United States should
propose to send white citizens of that country to sit cheek by jowl on
terms of official equality with the revolted blacks of Hayti fired the
Southern h