Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 6
1836-06-06
This is the Anniversary commonly called here Artillery Election. It is usually a warm showery day, not so this year it being a continuation of all former weather. I went to the Office. Read my father’s Speech in the Intelligencer which is very admirable.1 I am horrified also by a vote of Mr. Van Buren’s upon the bill to suppress incendiary publications. It led me to reflect what a miserable thing it was to depend upon a man without settled principles. But we can do nothing at present. Our course is marked out for us. A time may come for retribution. I hope it will. Judge White did no better than Mr. Van Buren, and there is no relief in looking round the compass.2
Accounts, Diary and a call from Mr. Walsh, then to see Mr. Brooks for a minute and home. Livy. Afternoon, assorting papers. Went over part of a correspondence between my grandfather and Edmund Jennings during which I was interrupted by a call from Mr. Hallett. He is in great agony about this vote, says it destroys Van Buren’s prospects in Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Ohio, and puts himself in a predicament not pleasant. He read to me a sketch of an editorial article which he proposed to insert upon it. It condemns the vote very gently and then goes on to offensive ground against the Atlas.3 I told him very frankly my opinions and my feelings. I did not approve the vote and could only sanction my continuing to support 405Mr. Van Buren by thinking of the alternatives. Evening at home, read the Drapier, and Ariosto.
See above, entry for 30 May, note.
A bill against “incendiary,” i.e. antislavery, publications “prohibiting deputy postmasters from receiving or transmitting through the mail to any State, Territory, or District, certain papers ... the circulation of which, by the laws of said State &c. may be prohibited” had been under debate in the Senate since early April. On 2 June consideration had reached the point of a vote on engrossment. In that vote, 18, including White, had voted yes and 18, including Webster, had voted no. Vice President Van Buren taking the chair and voting yes, the bill was ordered engrossed. Actually, the bill would be defeated in the final vote on passage, 19 to 25, with Van Buren not participating (National Intelligencer, 3 June, p. 2, cols. 5–6; 9 June, p. 3, col. 2. See also
Congressional Globe
, 24th Cong., 1st sess., App., p. 437–442).
Hallett’s editorial directed against the Atlas, entitled “The Party of Expediency,” would appear in the Advocate on the 8th (p. 2, cols. 2–3). In it, regret is expressed at Van Buren’s vote on the Incendiary Publications Bill, calling it “the most anti-republican of any vote Mr. Van Buren ever gave”; but at the same time the Whig press is chided for its sudden sympathy for abolitionism in opposing Van Buren’s position.