ited interest of friends, the malign aspersions of
political enemies, and his own indignant response to the hollow tirade
of his assailants, his defence, reduced to its elements, was simply
this: that the petition was sent to him for presentation; that it was a
subject for which the signers of it had a constitutional right to
petition, and that in presenting it he had proposed that the committee
should be instructed to report reasons why it ought not to be granted.
He said that he should not enter further into his self-defence at that
time, but should wait to see the action of the house upon those
resolutions. But whenever the proper time for his defence should come,
he pledged himself to show that "a portion of the country from which the
assailants came was endeavoring to destroy the right of habeas corpus,
and of trial by jury, and all the rights in which the liberties of the
country consist;"--"that there was in that portion of country a
systematic attempt even to carry it to the dissolution of the Union,
with a continual system and purpose to destroy all the principles of
civil liberty among the free states, and by power to force the detested
principles of slavery on the free States of this Union;" a pledge which
in the course of his subsequent argument he fully redeemed.

The last of January, Mr. Adams thus expressed himself concerning these
proceedings: "My occupations during the month have been confined
entirely to the business of the house, and for the last ten days to the
defence of myself against an extensive combination and conspiracy, in
and out of Congress, to crush the liberties of the free people of this
Union, by disgracing me with the brand of censure, and displacing me
from the chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, for my perseverance
in presenting abolition petitions. I am in the midst of that fiery
ordeal, and day and night absorbed in the struggle against this attempt
at my ruin. God send me a good deliverance!"

Intemperate debates, with violence undiminished, succeeded, in which all
the topics of party censure, from the adoption of the constitution, were
collected and heaped upon Mr. Adams by Marshall, Wise, Gilmer, and
others.

On the 3d of February Mr. Adams took the floor, and spoke for two hours
in his own defence, with an eloquence and effect to which no description
can do justice. He touched the low underplot of the Committee on Foreign
Affairs with pointed severity and bitter truth,