1843; Joshua R. Giddings, of
the Western Reserve, and Elijah P. Lovejoy, of Illinois, accepted the
agitator's commissions and sought to unite the new idealism with the old
Americanism. But John Quincy Adams, who had never been a democrat and
who did not sympathize with Garrison, became the arch-leader of the
abolitionists in Congress from 1836 to his death in 1848. Smarting under
the ill-treatment of Southern politicians, it was easy for the able
ex-President to become the political exponent of the new anti-Southern
agitation. In no other country of that time could a movement like
American abolitionism have gained such a hearing. In England the
Government, that is the people, never dreamed of destroying without
compensation the millions of property in the West Indian slaves. But
American abolitionists declared that there could be no property in man,
just as the socialists say there can be no property in land. To destroy
outright the property which underlay the Southern political power and
the Southern aristocracy was the aim of Garrison, and he found able men,
owners of large estates in the North, who were willing to do what he
urged.

Petitions asking the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia
were presented to Congress by John Quincy Adams in increasing numbers
from 1831 to 1836. Southern men denied that the national legislature had
the power to destroy property protected by the Constitution; Northern
men, especially representatives of the farmer districts, insisted that
the right of petition was fundamental to the Constitution itself. There
was a deadlock in Congress, for the South controlled the Senate, while
the North controlled the House. In this state of things, Southern
legislatures formally denounced the abolition movement as endangering
the Union, and asked Congress to protect them from the floods of
abolition literature which the United States mails carried into
communities where negro slaves were in the majority and where
insurrections were likely to occur.

In Charleston the people refused to allow the postmaster to deliver the
objectionable mail matter. The subject was carried to President Jackson
in 1835, and he decided that the uneasy masters of South Carolina were
justified in their protest. Calhoun, like Adams in New England, became
the champion of his section, and devoted the remainder of his life to a
vain defense of slavery against the "foul slanders" of anti-slavery
agitators.

In May