Witness to History, Peter Charles Hoffer and Williamjames Hull Hoffer, Series Editors American History
John Quincy Adams and the Gag Rule, 1835 – 1 850
Examining the congressional debates on antislavery petitions before the Civil War.
PETER CHARLES HOFFER Passed by the House of Representatives at the start of the 1836 session, the gag rule rejected all petitions against slavery, effectively forbidding Congress from addressing the antislavery issue until it was rescinded in late 1844. In the Senate, a similar rule lasted until 1850. The gag rule became a proxy defense of slavery’s morality and economic value in the face of growing pro-abolition sentiment. Peter Charles Hoffer transports readers to Washington, DC, in the period before the Civil War to contextualize the heated debates surrounding the rule. At first, Hoffer explains, only a few members of Congress objected to the rule. When they encountered an almost uniformly hostile audience, however, John Quincy Adams saw the effort to gag the petitioners as a violation of their constitutional rights. Adams’s campaign to lift the gag rule, joined each year by more and more northern members of Congress, revealed how the slavery issue promoted a virulent sectionalism and ultimately played a part in southern secession and the Civil War. A lively narrative, John Quincy Adams and the Gag Rule, 1835 –1850 vividly portrays the importance of the political machinations and debates that colored the age.
“A simply splendid book that will benefit student learners and their teachers. Lucid, fast-paced, clever, and richly researched.” — John David Smith, coauthor of Soldiering for Freedom: How the Union Army Recruited, Trained, and Deployed the U.S. Colored Troops
NOVEMBER 128 pages 6 x 9 11 b&w photos
Peter Charles Hoffer is a distinguished research professor of history at the University of
978-1-4214-2388-3
$17.95 (s) £13.50 pb
978-1-4214-2387-6
$49.95 (s)
Georgia. He is the author of Sensory Worlds in Early America, Prelude to Revolution: The
Also available as an e-book
£37.00 hc
Salem Gunpowder Raid of 1775, and Law and People in Colonial America.
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
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