ake the Louisiana treaty; but he did not dwell upon those points, nor
draw the consequences from them which I should think important. He spoke
on that subject, however, with great power, and the great slaveholders
in the house gnawed their lips and clenched their fists as they heard
him."

"At our evening parties," he adds, "we hear of nothing but the Missouri
question and Mr. King's speeches. The slaveholders cannot hear of them
without being seized with the cramps. They call them seditious and
inflammatory, which was far from being their character. Never, since
human sentiment and human conduct were influenced by human speech, was
there a theme for eloquence like the free side of this question, now
before the Congress of the Union. By what fatality does it happen that
all the most eloquent orators are on its slavish side? There is a great
mass of cool judgment and of plain sense on the side of freedom and
humanity, but the ardent spirits and passions are on the side of
oppression. O! if but one man could arise with a genius capable of
comprehending, a heart capable of supporting, and an utterance capable
of communicating, those eternal truths which belong to the question,--to
lay bare in all its nakedness that outrage upon the goodness of God,
human slavery,--now is the time, and this is the occasion, upon which
such a man would perform the duties of an angel upon earth."

About this time Mr. Calhoun remarked to Mr. Adams, that he did not think
the slave question, then pending in Congress, would produce a
dissolution of the Union, but, if it should, the South would, from
necessity, be compelled to form an alliance, offensive and defensive,
with Great Britain. Mr. Adams asked if that would not be returning to
the old colonial state. Calhoun said, Yes, pretty much, but it would be
forced upon them. Mr. Adams inquired whether he thought, if by the
effect of this alliance, offensive and defensive, the population of the
North should be cut off from its natural outlet upon the ocean, it would
fall back upon its rocks, bound hand and foot, to starve; or whether it
would retain its power of locomotion to move southward by land. Mr.
Calhoun replied, that in the latter event it would be necessary for the
South to make their communities all military. Mr. Adams pressed the
conversation no further, but remarked: "If the dissolution of the Union
should result from the slave question, it is as obvious as anything that
can be forese