232 C. F. Adams Southern and Southwestern States must be the Flanders of these compH- cated wars, the battlefield on which the last great battle must be fought between slavery and emancipation ; do you imagine that your Congress will have no constitutional authority to interfere with the institution of slavery in any way in the States of this Confederacy ? Sir, they must and will interfere with it — perhaps to sustain it by war ; perhaps to abolish it by treaties of peace ; and they will not only possess the con- stitutional power so to interfere, but they will be bound in duty to do it by the express provisions of the Constitution itself. From the instant that your slaveholding States become the theatre of war, civil, servile or foreign, from that instant the war powers of Congress extend to inter- ference with the institution of slavery in every way in which it can be interfered with, from a claim of indemnity for slaves taken or destroyed, to the cession of the State burdened with slavery to a foreign power. ' ' The following references to this speech are then found in the diary : May 2gth. — "I was occupied all the leisure of the day and evening in writing out for publication my speech made last Wednesday in the House of Representatives — -one of the most hazardous that I ever made, and the reception of which, even by the people of my own district and State, is altogether uncertain." June 2d. — " My speech oh the distribution of rations to the fugitives from Indian hostilities in Alabama and Georgia was published in the National Intelligencer of this morning, and a subscription paper was circulated in the House for printing it in a pamphlet, for which Gales told me there were twenty-five hundred copies ordered. Several members of the House of both parties spoke of it tome, some with strong dissent." June igth. — " My speech on the rations comes back with echoes of thundering vituperation from the South and West, and with one universal shout of applause from the North and East. This is a cause upon which I am entering at the last stage of life, and with the certainty that I cannot advance in it far ; my career must close, leaving the cause at the threshold. To open the way for others is all that I can do. The cause is good and great." So far as the record goes, the doctrine was not again propounded by Mr. Adams until 1841. On the 7th of June of that year he made a speech in the House of Representatives in support of a motion for the repeal of the Twenty-first Rule of the House, commonly known as " the Atherton Gag." Of this speech, no report exists ; but in the course of it he again enunciated the martial law theory of emancipation. The, next day he was followed in debate by C. J. Ingersoll, of Pennsylvania, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, who took occasion to declare that what he had heard the day previous had made his "blood curdle with horror." " Mr. Adams here rose in explanation, and said he did not say that in the event of a servile war or insurrection of slaves, the Constitution of the United States would be at an end. What he did say was this, that in the event of a servile war or insurrection of slaves, if the people of the free States were called upon to suppress the insurrection, and to spend their blood and treasure in putting an end to the war — a war in which the distinguished Virginian, the author of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, had said that ' God has no attribute in favor of the master ' —
