and after the time
when the article repugnant to the constitution of the United States
should be expunged from its constitution. This question was much more
clear against Missouri than was that of their first admission into the
Union; but the people of the North, like many of their representatives
in Congress, began to give indications of a disposition to flinch from
the consequences of this question, and to be unwilling to bear their
leaders out."

Mr. Adams, in conversation with one of the senators of the South,
observed, that "the article in the Missouri constitution is directly
repugnant to the rights reserved to every citizen in the Union in the
constitution of the United States. Its purport is to disfranchise all
the people of color who were citizens of the free states. The
Legislatures of those states are bound in duty to protect the rights of
their own citizens; and if Congress, by the admission of Missouri with
that clause in her constitution, should sanction this outrage upon
those rights, the states a portion of whose citizens should be thus
cast out of the pale of the Union would be bound to vindicate them by
retaliation. If I were a member of the Legislature of one of these
states, I would move for a declaratory act, that so long as the article
in the constitution of Missouri, depriving the colored citizens of the
state (say) of Massachusetts of their rights as citizens of the United
States within the State of Missouri, should subsist, so long the white
citizens of Missouri should be held as aliens within the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, and not entitled to claim or enjoy, within the same,
any right or privilege of a citizen of the United States." And Mr.
Adams said he would go further, and declare that Congress, by their
sanction of the Missouri constitution, by admitting that state into the
Union without excepting against that article which disfranchised a
portion of the citizens of Massachusetts, had violated the constitution
of the United States. Therefore, until that portion of the citizens of
Massachusetts whose rights were violated by the article in the Missouri
compromise should be reintegrated in the full enjoyment and possession
of those rights, no clause or article of the constitution of the United
States should, within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, be so
understood as to authorize any person whatsoever to claim the property
or possession of a human being as a slave; and he would prohibit