Examining the congressional debates on antislavery petitions before
the Civil War.
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rescinded in late 1844.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.
Strongly supported by all southern and some northern Democratic
congressmen, the gag rule became a proxy defense of slavery's morality
and economic value in the face of growing pro-abolition sentiment. In
John Quincy Adams and the Gag Rule, 1835-1850, 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. These antislavery representatives argued strongly for the
reception and reading of incoming abolitionist petitions. When they
encountered an almost uniformly hostile audience, however, John Quincy
Adams took a different tack. He 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 intended for history classrooms and anyone interested
in abolitionism, slavery, Congress, and the coming of the Civil War,
John Quincy Adams and the Gag Rule, 1835-1850, vividly portrays the
importance of the political machinations and debates that colored the
age.
