Beschreibung:

ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS Autograph letter signed to E. A. Stansbury in Burlington, Vermont; Boston, 2 January 1851. 3 pages, 4to, edges of second leaf neatly inlaid . "IN AMERICA, NOTHING IS TO BE REGARDED AS NATIONAL BUT SLAVERY" In August 1848 the anti-slavery Free Soil Party was formed at a convention attended by dissatisfied Whig and Democrats. Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams were nominated on a platform "asserting a resolve to maintain the rights of free labor against the agressions of the slave power, and to secure free soil for a free people." The candidates of the new party -- absorbed into the Republican Party in 1854 -- were defeated, and Adams retired from politics, to write a biography of his father John Quincy Adams and edit his works. Here, he comments on a newspaper article sent to him: "...The report of what I said at the Convention...which nominated Mr. [Horace] Mann, is misrepresented, as every thing is misrepresented which comes from Free Soil now... I did say, that I could not...accept any Office which should be offered to me by any combination of parties disagreeing essentially in regard to the principles of our Buffalo platform. But I did not accompany it with any denunciation of the Democratic party en masse whatever. On the contrary, I took pains... to lay down a rule by which we might, in some cases, overlook strict party lines, and cheerfully co-operate...as circumstances should dictate. This was a propos to the very nomination then before us of Mr. Mann, who has always kept aloof from our organization. [A year and a half later Mann ran for Governor of Massachusetts as the Free-Soil candidate, and was defeated.] I did intimate...that with the other class in both parties, the old, resolute, proslavery set, who consider the maintenance of the country to depend upon the cessation of [abolition] agitation, I could have no communion. A junction with such persons for...merely acquiring power could never be anything other than a bargain....There is another reason why I hold myself aloof from all associations with other parties at present. And that is that the systems upon which they act are all equally dilipidated... The bearing of this upon the democratic party which has always made an alliance with slavery a cardinal point of the national policy, you will readily perceive. "Whilst I am writing let me say one word about Vermont politics. I trust that your Governor will have character enough not to allow himself or the Legislature to be dragooned out of your law. Really it would seem as if in America nothing is to be regarded as national but slavery -- and every obstacle to its perpetuation over the entire colored race is to be considered unconstitutional and treasonable. The most astonishing thing of all is to witness the...ingenuity with which every new step of the dictator is excused even when nobody dares justify it. Surely, instead of advancing in our notions of Libery and Law since we became a people, we have been steadily going back to the doctrines of despotism.... And all this, we are told, is to sustain a Union intended to secure the blessings of freedom!..."