The Arrest of Gilbert Horton and the Rise of the Abolition Movement (Part 2)
Calls for End to Slavery in DC Lead to Congressional Crisis
Undaunted by southern legislators’ intransigence on the issue, local and state legislators from across the north continued petitioning Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. Alarmed that such a move would lead to calls for broader abolition, southern leaders urged continued vigilance in defense of the “peculiar institution,” with one Mississippi newspaper comparing the slaveholders’ situation to that of “a man overtaken in the wilderness by a snowstorm” who must not “yield but for a moment to the drowsiness produced by the intense cold” because, if he does “he sleeps to wake no more.”
The influential New York Journal of Commerce urged gentle persuasion of the south, rather than harsh criticism, arguing that southern opinion on the issue of slavery was turning. “For our part,” the Journal of Commerce editors said, “we are convinced, that if the slaveholding states refuse to cooperate with us in all reasonable and just measures to narrow the dimensions of this evil, slavery, it will not be because they are not fully sensible of the policy of doing it, but because they are pushed into resistance by unbecoming language.”
Still, petitions to abolish slavery in the District came, stirring still greater fear among the Southern legislators. Among the strongest voices rallying for Congressional action was one who had played a part in rescuing Gilbert Horton from enslavement: John Quincy Adams.
John Quincy Adams
Having lost his 1828 bid for reelection to the presidency, Adams soon after ran for a seat in the House of Representatives. Elected in 1831 to the Massachusetts’ 11th District, Adams was a thorn in the side of Southern Congressmen, repeatedly pushing petitions and resolutions aimed at ending slavery and the slave trade in the District. But his requests for consideration were repeatedly sent to a House committee composed entirely of slaveowners who argued that it would be “unconstitutional, unwise and impolitic,” for Congress to “interfere” in the District, absent the consent of Virginia and Maryland—the states that had ceded their land to create the federal enclave.
By February of 1836 the slave state bloc began agitating to end all Congressional debate on the matter.
In May, a report of the Select Committee upon the Subject of Slavery in the District of Columbia concluded that the Congress had “no Constitutional authority to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states” and “ought not to interfere in any way with slavery in the District.” Both resolutions easily passed the House.
To stem further calls for abolition the committee issued a stunningly sweeping resolution requiring that “all petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers, relating in any way or to any extent whatever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery shall, without either being printed or referred, be laid upon the table and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon.” The so-called “gag rule” passed 117-68.
Still, the agitation continued. In 1837-38 alone, anti-slavery advocates sent more than 130,000 petitions to Congress calling for abolition in the District.
Broadside of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836
Library of Congress
Adams was outraged by the direct assault on the Constitutional right of citizens to petition the government for a redress of grievances. For years, he tried using parliamentary maneuvers to read abolition petitions on the House floor and have them entered into the record, but the gag rule, reauthorized in one form or another with each new Congress, stifled his efforts. With solid Southern support and enough Northern allies seeking compromise on the slavery issue willing to lend their votes, gag rules remained in effect until 1844, when support for the suppression of debate finally waned. On December 3, Adams introduced a motion to rescind the gag rule. It passed 108-80.
Within a week, he presented a petition from New York citizens “praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia—and asserting that slavery is a national disgrace and that Congress has the constitutional authority to abolish it.”
Though he had secured the right of the people to petition Congress on the issue of slavery, and of Congress to act to abolish it in the District, Adams thought it more likely that slavery there would gradually fade away as the number of free blacks there surpassed the number of enslaved.
“I firmly believe,” Adams said soon after the gag rule was lifted, “that within the space of twenty, or perhaps ten years more, there will not be left a slave to emancipate; and before that period arrives, the few remaining owners will have become convinced that slavery is more of a burden than a benefit to them. The law of Slavery in the District will expire of its own weakness, and the people of the District will soon find in the increase of their own comfort and prosperity…how much cheaper is the labor of freedom than the blood-bought wages of slavery.”
The end of slavery in the District came a bit sooner than Adams expected, but only after the Southern states has seceded and the Civil War was in its second year. In 1862, President Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, under which slavery in the District was banned and slave owners were compensated from the loss of their “property.” They were paid $300 for each enslaved person, equivalent to about $9,000 today. They were the only enslavers compensated.
Neither Adams not William Jay believed Congress had the Constitutional authority to abolish slavery in the slave-holding states, though both advocated strongly against slavery’s expansion into new western territories. Jay withdrew from the various antislavery parties he had supported, as they pushed for more immediate and broader abolition and other causes, including women’s suffrage, but he continued to write, urging abolition.
Though his case caused outrage and put a face on the horrors of the District slave trade, Gilbert Horton is little remembered. No monuments or memorials exist. No books about him have been written. Census data, cemetery records, death notices, business and property transactions offer no evidence of his life after his harrowing days of confinement in the Nation’s Capital.