It is impossible for me to withhold from those appeals a responsive and yielding voice." He had voted, he said, for millions after millions, and would again and again vote for drafts from the public chest for the same purpose, should they…

It was a war, on the part of the United States, of conquest, and for the extension of slavery.

Adams then foretold, what subsequent events proved, that the war then commencing would be, on the part of the United States, "a war of aggression, conquest, and for the reëstablishment of slavery where it has been abolished.

In that war the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico, and your banners--I blush to speak the word--will be the banners of slavery.

She will carry emancipation and abolition with her in every fold of her flag; while your stars, as they increase in numbers, will be overcast by the murky vapors of oppression, and the only portion of your banners visible to the eye will…

A Mexican war; a war with Great Britain, if not with France; a general Indian war; a servile war; and, as an inevitable consequence of them all, a civil war;--for it must ultimately terminate in a war of colors, as well as of races.

The people of Alabama and Georgia are now suffering the recoil of their own unlawful weapons.

Georgia, sir, Georgia, by trampling upon the faith of our national treaties with the Indian tribes, and by subjecting them to her state laws, first set the example of that policy which is now in the process of consummation by this Indian…

To those prisons she committed inoffensive, innocent, pious ministers of the Gospel of truth, for carrying the light, the comforts, the consolations of that Gospel, to the hearts and minds of those unhappy Indians.

This, sir, is the remote and primitive cause of the present Indian war--your own injustice sanctioning and sustaining that of Georgia and Alabama.

Of the immediate causes of the war we are not yet fully informed; but I fear you will find them, like the remoter causes, all attributable to yourselves.

He hoped the people of this country would be spared the mortification, the injustice, and the wrong, of a decision that such petitions should not be received.

It was indeed true that all discussion, all freedom of speech, all freedom of the press, on this subject, had been, within the last twelve months, violently assailed in every form in which the liberties of the people could be attacked.

He considered these attacks as outrages on the constitution of the country, and the freedom of the people, as far as they went.

Among the outrages inflicted on that portion of the people of this country whose aspirations were raised to the greatest improvement that could possibly be effected in the condition of the human race,--the total abolition of slavery on…

Their petitions were treated with contempt, and the petitioners themselves loaded with foul and infamous imputations, poured forth on a class of citizens as pure and virtuous as the inhabitants of any section of the United States.

Where is your law which says that the mean, the low, and the degraded, shall be deprived of the right of petition, if their moral character is not good?

Where, in the land of freemen, was the right of petition ever placed on the exclusive basis of morality and virtue?

And where is the degree of vice or immorality which shall deprive the citizen of the right to supplicate for a boon, or to pray for mercy?

Does it say that, before presenting a petition, you shall look into it, and see whether it comes from the virtuous, and the great, and the mighty?

The right of petition belongs to all; and so far from refusing to present a petition because it might come from those low in the estimation of the world, it would be an additional incentive, if such an incentive were wanting.

Adams, in reply, exclaimed: "If this is true,--if a member is there made amenable to the Grand Jury for words spoken in debate,--I thank God I am not a citizen of South Carolina!

What! are we from the Northern States to be indicted as felons and incendiaries, for presenting petitions not exactly agreeable to some members from the South, by a jury of twelve men, appointed by a marshal, his office at the pleasure of…

If the gentleman from South Carolina, by bringing forward this resolution of censure, thinks to frighten me from my purpose, he has mistaken his man.

I am not to be intimidated by him, nor by all the Grand Juries of the universe.