ed to his constituents that he should hold
himself bound in allegiance to no party, whether sectional or political.
Ten years afterwards he had occasion to explain to his fellow-citizens
his policy and feelings at this period. "I thought this independence of
party was a duty imposed upon me by my peculiar position. I had spent
the greatest part of my life in the service of the whole nation, and had
been honored by their highest trust; my duty of fidelity, of affection,
and of gratitude, to the whole, was not merely inseparable from, but
identical with, that which was due from me to my own commonwealth. The
internal conflict between slavery and freedom had been, and still was,
scarcely perceptible in the national councils. The Missouri compromise
had laid it asleep, it was hoped, forever. The development of the moral
principle which pronounced slavery _a crime_ of man against his
brother-man had not yet reached the conscience of Christendom. England,
earnestly and zealously occupied in rallying the physical, moral, and
intellectual energies of the civilized world against the African
slave-trade, had scarcely yet discovered that it was but an instrument,
and in truth a mitigation, of the great, irremissible wrong of slavery.
Her final policy, the extinction of slavery throughout the earth, was
not yet disclosed. The Jackson project of dismembering Mexico for the
acquisition of Texas, already organized and in full operation, was yet
profoundly a secret. I entered Congress without one sentiment of
discrimination between the interests of the North and the South; and my
first act, as a member of the House, was, on presenting fifteen
petitions from Pennsylvania for the abolition of slavery within the
District of Columbia, to declare, while moving their reference to the
committee of the District, that I was not prepared to support the
measure myself, and that I should not. I was not then a sectional
partisan, and I never have been."[1]

[1] Address of John Quincy Adams to his Constituents, at
Braintree, September 17, 1842, p. 27.

When Mr. Adams was entering this new field of labor, Mr. Clay asked him
how he felt at turning boy again, and going into the House of
Representatives; and observed that he would find his situation extremely
laborious. Mr. Adams replied: "I well know this; but labor I shall not
refuse so long as my hands, my eyes, and my brain, do not desert me."

To understand the position in which Mr. A