Sold – Portion of the Adams’ Famed Filibuster Speech Given on the House Floor

Texas had barely won its independence in 1836 when it decided to become a part of the United States. A referendum held soon after the Battle of San Jacinto showed Texans favoring annexation by a vote of 3277 to 93. The question of the annexation of Texas quickly became one of the most controversial issues in American politics in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Annexation was controversial on  three important points: it meant the expansion of slavery into a vast new territory and there were concerns that U.S. annexation of Texas would provoke a war with Mexico, whose government never recognized General Santa Anna's surrender of its former province. Lastly, having to Texans in the U.S. Senate would upset the sectional balance of power in that body.

The duplicity, which I have charged upon the late and present Administrations of our Government, in the conduct of our national intercourse with Mexico and Texas, has not only been signalized by its bearing upon those foreign States, but it has been practised with equal assiduity upon the People of this Union themselves.

This annexation controversy took place in an atmosphere already heightened by the fight over the gag rule in the U.S. House of Representatives. The gagging of anti-slavery petitions by Congress started in 1835, with pro-slavery forces effectively preventing any discussion of slavery in Congress. So anti-slavery forces began submitting petitions for the abolition of slavery, believing that since there was a right to petition the government guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution, such petitions, and thus slavery itself, would have to be discussed. The pro-slavery congressmen responded with a series of gag rules that automatically "tabled" all such petitions, preventing them from being read or discussed. From the inception of the gag resolutions, John Quincy Adams led the opposition to the gag rules in the House, arguing that they were a direct violation of First Amendment rights. Rather than suppress anti-slavery petitions, however, the gag rules only served to offend Northerners and dramatically increase the number of petitions. In response, by December 1837 Congress tightened the gag rule even further.

In 1838, the first attempt was made in Congress to authorize the annexation of Texas. The elderly John Quincy Adams, then a member of the House of Representatives, staged a 22-day filibuster to block annexation. From June 16 to July 7, 1838, combining the related pro-slavery annexation and gag rule issues, he delivered a momentous speech on the floor of the House discussing freedom of petition and debate, the annexation of Texas, the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and the duplicity of the administration and Southern slave states. As he delivered it, many Southern Congressmen got up and left the hall. Adams filibustered Congress for three weeks, giving up the floor only when Congress adjourned for the summer recess. His speech was so powerful in marshalling opposition to the Texas bill that the Van Buren administration withdrew its support and the annexation attempt was blocked.

After Congress ended its session in July, Adams lingered in Washington to write out and publish his extemporaneous address. It was published as a pamphlet in late 1838, and entitled, “Speech of John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts upon the right of the people, men and women, to petition on the Freedom of Speech and of Debate in the House of Representatives of the United States; on the Resolutions of Seven State legislatures and the petitions of more than 100,000 petitioners relating to the annexation of Texas to the Union.”

In the following two-page fragment from this speech, written out for publication, Adams denounces the duplicity of the Jackson and Van Buren administrations and their thirst for a war with Mexico. The pages are numbered 9 and 10. The content speaks for itself.

“[A courier of] the Department of State, was afterwards sent to draw the circle of Popilius [demand an instanteous answer] around [Mexican] President Bustamente; and no sooner had another Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from Mexico set his foot in Washington, than he was insulted off to New Orleans, by a paragraph in the annual Message of the President of the United States to Congress, spurring that body to war, and telling them that negotiation was exhausted, and that they must provide self-redressing measures for the rights of their fellow-citizens, which lie the Executive Administration was no longer able to maintain.

"In no stronger light was this double-dealing ever disclosed than in the treatment of the petitions, memorials, and legislative resolutions, relating to the annexation, referred by the House to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and never looked into by them. The chairman of the committee actually charged the House with inadvertence in referring to the committee the petition from Lubec. He maintained that the subsequent reference of all the State resolutions, and all the petitions, had been contrary to the declared opinions of a large majority of the House, and he lamented that the motion to lay on the table, or the motion for the previous question upon the report of the committee, did not prevail. He represented the answer of the Secretary of State to the proposals of Mr. Memucan Hunt, as a prompt, positive, and irrevocable refusal; yet, what were the objections alleged by the Secretary against the acceptance of the offer? A war with Mexico; and a douht ]ust hinted of the constitutional jswicer of Congress. But two Presidents of the United States had, for the last eighteen months, been goading Congress into a war with Mexico, and the chairman of the committee himself declared that he thought, with the precedents of Louisiana and Florida, there was no room for the Constitutional doubt. He, too, had been among the most eager and inveterate stimulants to a Mexican war, and if it was true, as two Presidents had assured Congress, and as the chairman himself had responded in choral unison to the assertion, that a declaration of war by the United States against Mexico would have been justifiable in February, 1837, what objection could that leave to the acceptance of the proposal from Texas in September of the same year? Nothing but the Constitutional doubt, and of that the chairman of the committee had disposed by declaring, with great equanimity, that in his opinion there was nothing in if."

In his publication of the 21st of July, Colonel Howard's replying to my indignant remonstrances against the thrice-repeated gag, and complaining that he and his colleagues of the Committee on Foreign Affairs bad not enjoyed [the opportunity of refuting on the floor of the House the "many errors" of my speech]…”

When Woodrow Wilson wrote his “A History of the American people”, he considered this speech so important that he included it in the book.