[Footnote: Adams,
Memoirs, IV., 530, 531.]
To Adams himself the present question was but a "title page to a
great tragic volume." He believed that, if dissolution of the Union
should result from the slavery question, it would be followed by
universal emancipation of the slaves, and he was ready to
contemplate such a dissolution of the Union, upon a point involving
slavery and no other, believing that "the Union might then be
reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation." "This
object," wrote he, "is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects,
sublime and beautiful in its issue. A life devoted to it would be
nobly spent or sacrificed." [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, IV., 531.]
Looking forward to civil war, he declared: "So glorious would be its
final issue, that as God shall judge me I do not say that it is not
to be desired." [Footnote: Ibid., V., 210.] But as yet he confided
these thoughts to his diary. The south was far from contented with
the compromise, and her leading statesmen, Calhoun especially, came
bitterly to regret both the concession in the matter of admitting
federal control over slavery in the territories, and the division of
the Louisiana purchase into spheres of influence which left to the
slave-holding section that small apex of the triangle practically
embraced in Arkansas.
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