Concerning a suggestion that civil war might be preferable to the extension of slavery beyond the Mississippi, Adams said: "This is a question between the rights of human nature and the Constitution of the United States"--a form of stating the case which leaves no doubt concerning his ideas of the intrinsic right and wrong in the matter. His own notion was that slavery could not be got rid of within the Union, but that the only method would be dissolution, after which he trusted that the course of events would in time surely lead to reorganization upon the basis of universal freedom for all. He (p. 122) was not a disunionist in any sense, yet it is evident that his strong tendency and inclination were to regard emancipation as a weight in the scales heavier than union, if it should ever come to the point of an option between the two.
Strangely enough the notion of a forcible retention of the slave States within the Union does not seem to have been at this time a substantial element of consideration. Mr. Adams acknowledged that there was no way at once of preserving the Union and escaping from the present emergency save through the door of compromise. He maintained strenuously the power of Congress to prohibit slavery in the Territories, and denied that either Congress or a state government could establish slavery as a new institution in any State in which it was not already existing and recognized by law.
This agitation of the slavery question made itself felt in a way personally interesting to Mr. Adams, by the influence it was exerting upon men's feelings concerning the still pending and dubious treaty with Spain. The South became anxious to lay hands upon the Floridas and upon as far-reaching an area as possible in the direction of Mexico, in order to carve it up into more slave States; the North, on the other hand, no longer cared very eagerly for an extension of the Union upon its southern side. Sectional interests were getting to (p. 123) be more considered than national. Mr. Adams could not but recognize that in the great race for the Presidency, in which he could hardly help being a competitor, the chief advantage which he seemed to have won when the Senate unanimously ratified the Spanish treaty, had almost wholly vanished since that treaty had been repudiated by Spain and was now no longer desired by a large proportion of his own countrymen.