"
At last his enemies in Congress decided that they would endure his
attacks no longer. They took counsel together and agreed upon a plan
of operations looking to his expulsion from that body. As one of his
biographers, also a distinguished Congressman, expressed it: "It was
the preconcerted and deliberate purpose of the slave-masters to make
an example of the ringleader of political Abolitionism. They meant to
humiliate and crush him, and this they did not doubt their power to
do."
Mr. Adams submitted a petition, without giving it his personal
endorsement, asking for a dissolution of the Union. That furnished the
pretext his enemies wanted. They accused him of treason in
countenancing an assault upon the Union, although they were at the time
engaged in laying the foundation of a movement looking to its ultimate
overthrow. The outcome of this undertaking was one of the most
thrilling scenes ever witnesssd in the American Congress; or, for that
matter, in any other deliberative assembly.
Preparations for the affair were made with great elaborateness. The
galleries were filled with the friends, male and female, of
pro-slavery Congressmen.
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