Slavery constitution david waldstreicher biography
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Nevertheless, the people approved the Convention’s handiwork, confirming a pattern of dealmaking over slavery that held until the beginning of the Civil War.
A closely argued critique that exposes the deadly implications of the Constitution’s careful euphemisms about slavery. We also see in the diaries his reactions to major events, and to political opponents, that provided motives and contrasts and occasions for making tough choices—some more explicit than others.It’s important to remember that he was a student of rhetoric, the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.
Then, during the Jefferson administration, at a moment when sectional and partisan loyalties came to overlap and reinforce each other for many New Englanders, he cast his lot with the Jeffersonians and left the Federalist party.
His anti-partisanship, partially inherited, is often said to have doomed his presidency, but it was also a source of his appeal, and of his rise in the Madison and Monroe administrations.
Rather, over his decades in the public eye, first as an ambassador, then senator, Secretary of State, Commander in Chief, and finally congressman for his home state of Massachusetts, Adams construed a political vision of the United States rooted in the Declaration of Independence and its commitment to liberty and equality among men.
John Quincy Adams: Speeches & Writings
In the recently published Library of America edition of Adams’s speeches and writings, historian David Waldstreicher gathers this consummate statesman’s greatest statements on democracy, abolition, and the role of federal government, illustrating his prescience, erudition, and acuity in response to competing visions of the nation, the fault lines of which remain visible to this day.
Below, Waldstreicher discusses his curation of the new volume, Adams’s ardent and complex nationalism, and what his words can teach us about dissent and popular representation in our own time.
LOA:This volume covers Adams’s half century in public service, from his Harvard commencement address in 1787 to his late-career antislavery writings.
He was rarely satisfied, even though he knew he was often working under deadlines.
Eventually, the fruits can be seen in the published versions of his Congressional speeches, where he was both using ideas and bon mots he had taken time to develop, and quickly editing them for newspapers and the Congressional Record, and sometimes for pamphlet publication.
Detail from the diary of John Quincy Adams (Massachusetts Historical Society Collections)
LOA:A through line in Adams’s thought is his belief in the union: the idea that the nation is not, in his words, “a mere cluster of sovereign confederated States,” but a single people united under a common national government.
Like all editing, it was a balancing act to represent the many stages of his career while tracing important through lines in his thinking. He is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. My hope is that reading these works in context, and together, a whole emerges that is greater than the parts, great as they are.
First, his alliance with southerners, through which he thought national progress could be managed, fell apart during his presidency. His scholarly articles and books have won prizes from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the, Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the American Jewish Historical Society.
How did failure mold Adams?
DW: Political failure added a measure of humility and a longer-term perspective that he might not have otherwise achieved, and which many—perhaps most—politicians don’t have.
1843 daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams by Philip Haas (Public Domain)
David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of numerous acclaimed works, including The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, and Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification.
David Waldstreicher's biography of Wheatley will be the definitive biography for years to come. In the pages of Waldstreicher's lucidly written book, Wheatley's poetry lives and speaks afresh: both as a record of her revolutionary life and as a commentary on her Revolutionary times.”
Doug Bradburn, President & CEO of Mount Vernon, said, “Phillis Wheatley was admired by George Washington, and she led an extraordinary American life.
This prestigious annual award recognizes the past year's best works on the nation's founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance a broad public understanding of early American history.
Created by George Washington's Mount Vernon, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Washington College, the $50,000 George Washington Prize is one of the nation's largest and most notable literary awards.
The 2024 winner was announced at a gala dinner held over the weekend at Mount Vernon, George Washington's home in Virginia.
Waldstreicher is a historian of early and nineteenth-century America, with a focus on political history, cultural history, slavery and antislavery, and print culture.
He is the editor of A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams and, for Library of America, of The Diaries of John Quincy Adams in two volumes.
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SLAVERY’S CONSTITUTION
A historian finds the seeds of an inevitable civil war embedded in the “contradictions, ambiguities, and silences” about slavery in the Constitution.
Fully aware of the embarrassing disconnect between the American Revolution’s rhetoric and the facts on the ground, the colonists adopted a politics of slavery that sought to normalize or dissolve the institution into euphemisms like “species of property.” By the 1780s, with America newly independent, enlightened minds foresaw the end of slavery, but that movement collided with a simultaneous push for a stronger federal government.
The resulting incident, in which Adams stripped off his coat and “went seriously to work” on the offending root, endeared him to his Washington audience but is notable as a rare moment of public spectacle in an otherwise highly restrained and stunt-averse career. There were certainly intimations earlier (see the “Publius Valerius” essays of 1804), but being out of office, and the trends under Jackson and the Democrats, led him to a reconsider what he in particular ought to say.
After 1831, too, his job was different than it had ever been, even during his years in the Senate.
It’s been neglected, even though it sets up his more famous Gag Rule speeches.
I do think that Adams’s early experience in thinking and acting internationally served him well in dissecting and representing the politics of slavery in opposition, during the 1830s and 1840s. Previously, he taught at Temple University, University of Notre Dame, Yale University, and Bennington College.
Adam Goodheart, Director of Washington College's Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, said, “Phillis Wheatley's name is known to millions of people, but the details of her life and especially her work are hardly familiar except to scholars.
One of the things that this edition of his writings brings out is not only his consistent nationalism, but his insistence that the nation was created in 1776, not 1787, and that the proslavery compromises could be revised by a return to the principles of 1776.
LOA:Among the more remarkable arcs in Adams’s long career is the evolution of his thinking on slavery, from studied avoidance for the sake of union to the late-in-life denunciations of the “slaveocracy” from the floor of Congress.
Deeply researched, rich with historical and literary detail, with subtle readings of her poems and their classical antecedents, Waldstreicher gives us a Wheatley who is not only ‘the mother of African American literature,' but a serious actor in the politics and religious life of the American founding.”
Each year since the Prize was created in 2005, an independent jury evaluates 50 to 100 books published in the previous year that explore the history of the American founding era.
He balanced the Monroe cabinet and thought he could continue to play that role in Washington.
Two Old-Time Standard-Bearers of Public Morality chromolithograph by Friedrich Graetz depicting busts of George Washington and John Quincy Adams, 1884 (Massachusetts Historical Society)
His nationalism never abated, but he came to realize that he had provided cover for a southern-dominated, proslavery regime.
What emerges in the journals that might enhance our understanding of Adams’s published writings, and vice versa?
DW: As I was editing the diaries it became clear to me that Adams developed arguments there that he would present publicly, or codify, in major speeches.