cumstances had brought into competition with him;"
they had returned his "acts of kindness and services" with "gross
injustice." The reflection did not induce him to deflect his course in
the least, but it was made with much bitterness of spirit. Toward the
close of 1835 he writes:--

"Among the dark spots in human nature which in the course of my
life I have observed, the devices of rivals to ruin me have been
sorry pictures of the heart of man.... H. G. Otis, Theophilus
Parsons, Timothy Pickering, James A. Bayard, Henry Clay, Jonathan
Russell, William H. Crawford, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson,
Daniel Webster, and John Davis, W. B. Giles, and John Randolph,
have used up their faculties in base and dirty tricks to thwart
my progress in life and destroy my character."

Truly a long and exhaustive list of enmities! One can but suspect (p. 297)
that a man of so many quarrels must have been quarrelsome. Certain it
is, however, that in nearly every difference which Mr. Adams had in
his life a question of right and wrong, of moral or political
principle, had presented itself to him. His intention was always good,
though his manner was so habitually irritating. He himself says that
to nearly all these men--Russell alone specifically excepted--he had
"returned good for evil," that he had "never wronged any one of them,"
and had even "neglected too much his self-defence against them." In
October, 1833, he said: "I subject myself to so much toil and so much
enmity, with so very little apparent fruit, that I sometimes ask
myself whether I do not mistake my own motives. The best actions of my
life make me nothing but enemies." In February, 1841, he made a
powerful speech in castigation of Henry A. Wise, who had been
upholding in Southern fashion slavery, duelling, and nullification. He
received afterward some messages of praise and sympathy, but noted
with pain that his colleagues thought it one of his "eccentric, wild,
extravagant freaks of passion;" and with a pathetic sense of
loneliness he adds: "All around me is cold and discouraging and my own
feelings are wound up to a pitch that my reason can scarcely (p. 298)
endure." A few days later he had the pleasure of hearing one of the
members say, in a speech, that there was an opinion among many that
Mr. Adams was insane and did not know what he said. While a fight was
going on such incidents only fired his blood, but afterwards