e
received. Mr. Adams tauntingly suggested that in order to do this it
would be necessary to mutilate the document by cutting it into two
pieces; whereat there was great wrath and confusion, "the House got
into a snarl, the Speaker knew not what to do." The Southerners raved
and fumed for a while, and finally resorted to their usual expedient,
and dropped altogether a matter which so sorely burned their fingers.

A fact, very striking in view of the subsequent course of events,
concerning Mr. Adams's relation with the slavery question, seems
hitherto to have escaped the attention of those who have dealt with
his career. It may as well find a place here as elsewhere in a
narrative which it is difficult to make strictly chronological.
Apparently he was the first to declare the doctrine, that the
abolition of slavery could be lawfully accomplished by the exercise of
the war powers of the Government. The earliest expression of this
principle is found in a speech made by him in May, 1836, concerning
the distribution of rations to fugitives from Indian hostilities in
Alabama and Georgia. He then said:--

"From the instant that your slave-holding States become the
theatre of war, civil, servile, or foreign, from that instant (p. 262)
the war powers of the Constitution extend to interference with
the institution of slavery in every way in which it can be
interfered with, from a claim of indemnity for slaves taken or
destroyed, to a cession of the State burdened with slavery to a
foreign power."

In June, 1841, he made a speech of which no report exists, but the
contents of which may be in part learned from the replies and
references to it which are on record. Therein he appears to have
declared that slavery could be abolished in the exercise of the
treaty-making power, having reference doubtless to a treaty concluding
a war.

These views were of course mere abstract expressions of opinion as to
the constitutionality of measures the real occurrence of which was
anticipated by nobody. But, as the first suggestions of a doctrine in
itself most obnoxious to the Southern theory and fundamentally
destructive of the great Southern "institution" under perfectly
possible circumstances, this enunciation by Mr. Adams gave rise to
much indignation. Instead of allowing the imperfectly formulated
principle to lose its danger in oblivion, the Southerners assailed it
with vehemence. They taunted Mr. Ada