The Underground Railroad
The two previous posts in this year's series discussed Democratic Sen. Thomas Morris (1776-1844) of Ohio, an early proponent of the anti-slavery position in the US Senate. Morris is an important figure from the more consistently democratic, pro-labor trend of Jacksonian Democracy that became antislavery.
John Neuenschwander in Senator Thomas Morris: Antagonist of the South, 1836-1839 Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 32/3 (Fall 1974) makes a telling comparison of the House slavery critics of the 1830s, John Quincy Adams and William Slade, and Morris.
Adams had been Andrew Jackson's chief opponent in the 1824 and 1828 Presidential elections. Despite winning fewer popular votes than Jackson, Adams won the Electoral College vote in 1824. Jackson's partisans regarded the result as stemming from a "corrupt bargain". The Jacksonians also viewed Adams as President as being the advocate of the very wealthy against the interests of the majority. And not without good reason.
After Adams was defeated in 1828, he ran for the House of Representatives and served as a Massachusetts Congressman from 1831 to 1848. While there, he engaged the slavery issue and greatly helped raise the profile of the antislavery movement. Whatever his shortcomings and faults as President, he is rightly regarded as having contributed to American democracy in a very positive way in his House service.
Jacksonians like Morris were only beginning at the time to actively oppose slavery, as were some of Adams' Whig colleagues. After the traumatic crisis that led to the Compromise of 1820 that expanded the reach of slavery in the territories, there had been a tacit agreement in Congress to avoid discussing measures such as the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia that would have disturbed the uneasy truce between the defenders of slavery and those who opposed its expansion and looked forward to its eventual end.
Adams, Morris and Slade led the way in changing that pattern in Congress in the 1830s. However, Neuenschwander observes of Adams:
Although Morris, Adams, and Slade were all working for the same ends in Congress, they differed substantially in their individual political and moral perspectives. John Quincy Adams seems to have stood the furthest from the abolitionists. While he no doubt considered slavery to be the greatest national evil, he was not willing to see it completely extirpated if the price was disunion. In hopes of furthering emancipation without endangering the nation, the former President advocated antislavery positions in Congress but refused to have any public association with abolitionist groups. Hated and feared by the South and respected from a distance by the antislavery element, John Quincy Adams almost seemed to be above partisanship. The Northern abolitionists wanted to have him as one of their own but like Sarah Grimke they always "... came away sick at heart of political morality." Even his steadfast Vermont ally, William Slade, was driven to exasperation by Adams' adamant refusal to vote for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. [my emphasis]William Slade was more explicit than either Adams or Morris about his opposition to slavery, and couched it in more explicitly religious terms than did either of the other two. "After becoming an exponent of immediate emancipation in 1837 he moved on the next year to embrace the abolitionists' most controversial position - racial equality," writes Neuenschwander. This was farther than most Abolitionists were willing to go right up to the Civil War.
Morris never publicly embraced the notion of racial equality between blacks and whites. But he was more outspoken than either Adams or Slade about the Slave Power notion. And his fellow slavery opponent and Liberty Party member Salmon Chase said in 1845 after Morris' death late the previous year, as quoted by Neuenschwander:
He was far beyond the time he lived in. He first led me to see the character of the slave power... Few antislavery men of today, with all the light thrown on the subject saw this matter as clearly as did he.An admirable legacy. And a thoroughly Jacksonian one.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, john quincy adams, slavery, thomas morris, us south
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