The federal authority had so long been factiously opposed, that the popular respect for its laws needed to be renewed.  The State of Georgia presented the fit occasion.  She insisted on expelling, forcibly, remnants of Indian tribes, within her limits, in virtue of a treaty which was impeached for fraud, and came for revision before the Supreme Court and the Senate.  The President met the emergency with boldness and decision.  The demonstration thus given that good faith should be practised, and the law have its way, no matter how unequal the litigating parties, operated favorably toward restoring the moral influence of the Government.  That influence, although sometimes checked, has recently increased in strength, until the federal authority is universally regarded as final, and liberty again walks confidently hand in hand with law.

John Quincy Adams “loved peace and ensued it.”  He loved peace as a Christian, because war was at enmity with the spirit and precepts of a religion which he held to be divine.  As a statesman and magistrate, he loved peace, because war was not merely injurious to national prosperity, but because, whether successful or adverse, it was subversive of liberty.  Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.  He favored, therefore, all the philanthropic efforts of the age to cultivate the spirit of peace, and looked forward with benevolent hope to the ultimate institution of a General Congress of nations for the adjustment of their controversies.  But he was no visionary and no enthusiast.  He knew that as yet war was often inevitable—­that pusillanimity provoked it, and that national honor was national property of the highest value; because it was the best national defence.  He admitted only defensive war—­but he did not narrowly define it.  He held that to be a defensive war, which was waged to sustain what could not be surrendered or relinquished without compromising the independence, the just influence, or even the proper dignity of the State.  Thus he had supported the war with Great Britain—­thus in later years he sustained President Jackson in his bold demonstration against France, when that power wantonly refused to perform the stipulations it had made in a treaty of indemnity; and thus he yielded his support to what was thought a warlike measure of the present administration in the diplomatic controversy with Great Britain concerning the Territory of Oregon.  The living and the dead have mutual rights, and therefore it must be added that he considered the present war with Mexico as unnecessary, unjust, and criminal.  His opinion on this exciting question is among those on which he referred himself to that future age which he so often constituted the umpire between himself and his contemporaries.