Old Man Eloquent and the GAG RULE

The Speaker of the House punctuated his shouts with the banging of his gavel. Across the marble-columned U.S. House of Representatives, enraged southern congressmen howled and shook their fists.

- Duane Damon

"Order! Order!"

The object of their scorn was the slight form standing defiantly at desk number 203. Two and a half years after leaving the White House, John Quincy Adams was back.

Adams's one-term presidency from 1825 to 1829 had been a struggle of partisan politics. His failed race for a second term had been bitter and nasty. His loss had convinced his family and colleagues that he had fought his last fight. Adams himself vowed, "to go into the deepest retirement and withdraw from all connections with public affairs." But the residents of the Massachusetts district in which Adams lived had other ideas. Impressed with his courage and integrity, they had elected him to the U.S. House of Representatives.

When questioned about his new position, Adams dismissed the idea that it was degrading for a former president-the leader of the nation to serve as a congressman. For Adams, public service was an honorable duty. "No election or appointment conferred on me ever gave me so much pleasure," he exclaimed in his diary. On December 5, 1831, the 64-year-old Adams took his seat and began a new, fateful chapter in his public life.

Through the early 1800s, slavery had grown into a divisive issue in U.S. politics. Other nations already had ended or limited the practice. Slaveholders across the American South grew increasingly fearful of the same fate and the threat it posed to their way of life on plantations and farms. At the same time, the idea of abolition-ending slavery and freeing all slaves began to spread steadily through northern states. Antislavery supporters bombarded Congress with petitions. Early petitions called for the end of slavery only in the District of Columbia. Eventually, calls grew to abolish the institution across the South.