It can hardly be necessary to state that allusion is here made to his advocacy of the Right of Petition, and his determined hostility to slavery.  At an age when most men would leave the stormy field of public life, and retire to the quiet seclusion of domestic comfort, these great topics inspirited Mr. Adams with a renewed vigor.  With all the ardor and zeal of youth, he placed himself in the front rank of the battle which ensued, plunged into the very midst of the melee, and, with a dauntless courage, that won the plaudits of the world, held aloft the banner of freedom in the Halls of Congress, when other hearts quailed and fell back!  He led “the forlorn hope” to the assault of the bulwarks of slavery, when the most sanguine believed his almost superhuman labors would be all in vain.  In these contests a spirit blazed out from his noble soul which electrified the nation with admiration.  In his intrepid bearing amid these scenes he fully personified the couplet quoted in one of his orations:—­

  “Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,
     Lord of the lion heart and eagle eye! 
   Thy steps I follow, with my bosom bare,
     Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.”

The first act in the career of Mr. Adams as a Member of Congress, was in relation to slavery.  On the 12th of December, 1831, it being the second week of the first session of the twenty-second Congress, he presented fifteen petitions, all numerously signed, from sundry inhabitants of Pennsylvania, praying for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia.  In presenting these petitions, Mr. Adams remarked, that although the petitioners were not of his immediate constituents, yet he did not deem himself at liberty to decline presenting their petitions, the transmission of which to him manifested a confidence in him for which he was bound to be grateful.  From a letter which had accompanied the petitions, he inferred that they came from members of the Society of Friends or Quakers; a body of men, he declared, than whom there was no more respectable and worthy class of citizens—­none who more strictly made their lives a commentary on their professions; a body of men comprising, in his firm opinion, as much of human virtue, and as little of human infirmity, as any other equal number of men, of any denomination, upon the face of the globe.

The petitions for the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, Mr. Adams considered relating to a proper subject for the legislation of Congress.  But he did not give his countenance to those which prayed for the abolition of slavery in that District.  Not that he would approbate the system of slavery; for he was, and in fact had been through life, its most determined foe.  But he believed the time had not then arrived for the discussion of that subject in Congress.  It was his settled conviction that a premature agitation of slavery in the national councils would greatly retard, rather than facilitate, the abolition of that giant evil—­“as the most salutary medicines,” he declared in illustration, “unduly administered, were the most deadly of poisons.”