IV.

Later Life

After his defeat, Adams returned to Massachusetts, expecting to spend the remainder of his life in political retirement. He planned to supervise his farm and to write. However, in 1831 conservative Massachusetts political leaders persuaded him to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. To critics who believed that an ex-president should not humble himself by seeking election to Congress, Adams answered, “No person could be degraded by serving the people as a representative in Congress.” He overwhelmingly defeated his Jacksonian opponent in the election.

As a congressman, Adams followed an independent course. In 1833 he tried unsuccessfully to stop President Jackson from moving federal funds from the Bank of the United States into selected state banks, called “pet banks.” Adams stated that the use of the pet banks would result in a financial depression, and he believed his prediction was borne out by the economic crisis that came to be known as the Panic of 1837.

In 1832 Adams helped formulate a new tariff that lowered several of the high import duties imposed by the Tariff of Abominations. Although substantial concessions were made to the South, they were not enough to please Southern planters. Northern manufacturers, in turn, were outraged at the tariff reductions. A compromise bill that gradually lowered rates over a ten-year period was eventually worked out in 1833.

In 1836, when the question of annexing the independent republic of Texas first arose, Adams opposed annexation. He feared that Texas would be made into one or even several slaveholding states, since it had been given the right to divide into as many as five states.

Adams became further involved in the slavery issue in his long struggle to revoke the so-called gag rule. The gag rule was adopted in 1836 to stop an ever-increasing flow to Congress of petitions demanding the abolition of slavery. Such petitions, many of which were presented by Adams, were to be tabled in the House without discussion. Adams regarded the gag rule as a violation of the constitutional right to petition, and for eight years he used every parliamentary technique he knew to discredit it. Finally, in 1844, Adams rallied enough support to force repeal of the rule.

Adams again acted on his anti-slavery convictions when he helped argue the Amistad case before the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1839 two planters in the Spanish colony of Cuba purchased a group of about 50 Africans who had been transported there in violation of bans on international slave trading. After obtaining false identification papers in order to establish their status as legal slaves in Cuba, the planters placed the Africans on the ship L'Amistad and joined them on a voyage to another part of Cuba. After several days at sea the Africans killed the captain, took over the ship, and ordered the planters to sail to Africa. Instead, the planters secretly navigated toward the United States. When the U.S. Coast Guard seized the ship off the coast of Long Island, New York, the planters accused the Africans of murder and sought to have them returned to Cuba as slaves.

After a trial court concluded that the Africans had never legally been slaves and should be returned to Africa, the U.S. government appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. Due to his alignment with a proslavery faction of the Democratic Party, president Martin van Buren favored the return of the Africans to the planters. However, the Supreme Court, after hearing lengthy arguments by Adams, agreed with the trial court and ruled that the Africans were free. With money raised by abolitionists, 35 of the survivors returned to West Africa in 1842. The others had died at sea or while waiting trial.

When President James Polk asked Congress to declare war on Mexico in 1846, Adams voted against it. He believed that Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder, had deliberately schemed to start the war to obtain territory from Mexico for the creation of new slave states. He criticized Polk for sending troops to disputed territory on the U.S.-Mexican border. Adams believed that by his action Polk had already declared war on Mexico in fact if not in name, and had thus overridden the constitutional provision that gave this power only to Congress. However, when Congress declared war on Mexico, Adams voted for the necessary military appropriations.

Adams was not concerned solely with political and diplomatic matters. He had long been interested in scientific research, and mainly through his efforts the bequest of British chemist James Smithson was used to establish the Smithsonian Institution.

Late in 1846, Adams suffered a stroke. He recovered enough to resume his seat in Congress a few months later. One year afterward, on February 21, 1848, he responded to a roll call of his name in the House chambers, then fell forward on his desk. It was a second stroke. He was carried to the Speaker’s room in the Capitol. Adams died two days later, on February 23rd.