Nationism and John Quincy Adams’ Argument in the Amistad Case, or “Who Speaks for the Nation?”

Eleven years after he completed his one-term presidency, John Adams argued the slave trade case Amistad (1841) before the U.S. Supreme Court. A variety of historical judgments have been rendered on his speech, none of which has engaged with the argument’s interface with his dedication to nation-making and the Union. Capitalizing on a cache of diplomatic correspondence related to the case, advisory letters, and analysis of the supreme court argument, this article contends Adams’ speech before the court is more appropriately understood in the context of nation-building rather than as a natural law argument about the liberty rights of black slaves or a plea for the abolition of slavery, as has been commonly inferred. Taking this position allows us to reframe Adams’ argument in his postpresidential years in the House of Representatives when he became invested in the slavery question in a way he had largely avoided as a secretary of state and as president. That is, Adams appears in his later years to have separated from the founding generation’s adherence to preserving the Union as a nation and dedicated himself to the threat sectionalism and slavery posed to the Union. But in the Amistad case, he had not yet transitioned to that position, despite what many historians and popular accounts have contended. Adams’ pragmatism in foreign affairs as secretary of state and in his national improvements as president can best be described as politically pragmatic unionist nation-building. Slavery had not yet emerged in his self-presentation as the singularly most destructive threat to the fabric of the Union. Only in his later years did he incorporate concerns raised by territorial expansion and humanitarian views of human freedom into a more assertive willingness to engage with slavery in a more militant way and to merge it with his earlier pragmatism.