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“The Cause of Human Freedom”:

John Quincy Adams and the Problem of Opium in the Age of

Emancipation

ON NOVEMBER 20, 1841, Congressman John Quincy Adams fretted in his diary

about “a storm upon my head worse than that which I am already afflicted.”

Adams, in 1841, had many reasons to fret. His successful involvement in the

Amistad case that year, along with his unflagging assault on the

Congressional gag rule had turned him into a lodestone for Southern vitriol.

But, in the winter of 1841, the controversy that Adams dreaded was not a

result of his antipathy toward Southern chattel slavery, but his decision to

confront slavery in another realm: the patriarchal slave empire of Qing

China. “The flowery Land, the celestial Empire,” Adams said, was an “atheist

nation of slaves,” a vast country of “300 millions of souls” where “the

Patriarchal system of Sir Robert Filmer, flourishes in all its glory.” In a lecture

to members of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Adams expressed a

hope that “Britain, after taking the lead in the abolition of the African Slave

trade and of slavery… will extend her liberating arm to the farthest bounds

of Asia.” This “cause of human freedom,” which Adams rhapsodized, was

none other than the Opium War, a war that the Chinese would later come to

understand in different terms.1

1 John Quincy Adams (JQA), November 20, 1841, “The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection,” Massachusetts Historical Society, http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php/, henceforth cited as JQA Diary; JQA, “John Quincy Adams on the Opium War,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 43 (Oct. 1909-Jun. 1910), 307 and 313-315, henceforth cited as JQA Lecture; JQA to James Brooks, 20 January 1842, Reel 154, Adams Family Papers (AFP), Massachusetts Historical Society

http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/php/

John Quincy Adams and the Problem of Opium in the Age of Emancipation

Adams’s transmutation of the Opium War into a war for “human

freedom” defied belief. Few could grasp why the hero of Amistad now staked

his formidable reputation to defend what was plainly a “war of aggression

against the Chinese.” One Philadelphia newspaper quipped: “The o’d man

must be getting out of his senses!” Yet Adams, at seventy-three years of

age, was not speaking from senility. Like all of his publications, Adams’s

speech was crafted with an aim to startle, provoke, and ultimately, persuade.

But the question still stood. How did Adams understand the meaning of

liberty—and slavery—that he envisaged China, an empire far removed from

the African slave trade, as a “nation of slaves?” Answering this question

requires an examination of the social, political and ideological contexts of

Adams’s time, contexts that would have made such an extraordinary reading

of the Opium War plausible to himself. They deserve our careful scrutiny, for

they throw light on the unexpected byways through which slavery, opium

and the Orient traveled as interlocking symbols in nineteenth-century

transimperial discourse. In the colossal historiography of slavery and

abolition, few have studied the tessellation of slavery and bodily addiction

(Boston, MA); JQA to Richard Rush, December 20, 1842, Reel 154, AFP, my italics. Scholars commonly refer to the Opium War (1839-42) as the First Opium War in order to distinguish it from the Second Opium War (1856-60); here, I use the term “Opium War” synonymously with the First Opium War. For background, see Hsin-Pao Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, MA and London, 1964); Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China (New York, 2014); Mao Haijian, Joseph Lawson and Craig Smith, trans., The Qing Empire and the Opium War (New York, 2016); Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (New York, 2018). For background on the Amistad case, see Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens, 2000) and Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, 2012).

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induced by what Karl Marx called opium’s “stupendous traffic.” By

engendering two novel ideological concepts—slavery as “Chinese patriarchy”

and slavery as “opium slavery”—the Opium War roiled the politics of

abolition by interpolating the problem of drugs into the problem of racial

slavery. During an era when their peculiar institution came under assault,

slaveholders’ discovery of the Asian opium trade gifted them with a potent

cudgel to defend chattel slavery and expose liberalism’s hypocrisies. In turn,

influential antislavery thinkers such as Adams conflated the tyranny of the

slave owner with the despotism of the Chinese emperor, conjoining an

abolitionist’s convictions and an orientalist’s gaze.2

Despite its import, Adams’s “famous lecture” has fallen largely into

oblivion. Its bizarreness is partially to blame. Filled with rambling asides and

histrionic ejaculations, the lecture was not Old Man Eloquent’s most eloquent

specimen of writing. Many of Adams’s admirers were perplexed by its claims.

“Your argument convicts the Chinese of offending against international

morals by an unsocial and selfish policy,” wrote John Palfrey, editor of the

2 “Mr. Adams and the Opium War,” The Sun (Baltimore, MD), December 20, 1841; Public Ledger (Philadelphia, PA), November 26, 1841; Karl Marx, “Trade or Opium?”, New York Daily Tribune, September 20, 1858. Adams’s evolving and complex views on slavery are discussed in Alison T. Mann, Slavery Exacts an Impossible Price: John Quincy Adams and the Dorcas Allen Case, Washington D.C. (PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 2010); Matthew Mason, “John Quincy Adams and the Tangled Politics of Slavery,” in David Waldstreicher, ed., A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams (Chichester, 2013), 402-21; David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason, John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery (New York, 2017). On the notion of “transimperial” discourse, see Li Chen, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice & Transcultural Politics (New York, 2016). Recent syntheses of antislavery include Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London, 2011); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York, 2014); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven and London, 2016). For a similar study on “antislavery symbolism” and its ambiguities, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York, 1999).

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North American Review, “[b]ut the further question, whether these have

constituted an injury, for which the English government may seek redress by

war, you do not yet discuss.” Palfrey then rejected his manuscript for

publication, and wished the Congressman a “useful and happy winter.” Like

Palfrey, scholars have puzzled over Adams’s apparently cavalier attitude

about drugs. One explanation, favored by historians of China, was that the

lecture betrayed his orientalist prejudices. As an apologia for imperialism,

Adams urged the Christian powers of the West to put aside their customary

rivalries and close ranks against an alien, racial other. But gesturing to

orientalism without further recognizing the era’s convoluted politics is

insufficient. Consider a counter-example: many Americans at the time, such

as South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, sympathized with China’s grievances

and condemned Britain’s imperialism—though this hardly makes Calhoun a

forerunner of Edward Said. The historian’s burden is to explain therefore why

Calhoun, the “embodied spirit” of white supremacy, and Adams, slavery’s

curmudgeonly scourge, took opposite positions on the morality of the Opium

War.3

3 “Mr. Adams’s New Code of International Law,” The Globe (Washington, D.C.), December 27, 1841; John G. Palfrey to JQA, November 29, 1841, as cited in JQA Lecture, 301-2; JQA Diary, January 2, 1843. Extended references to JQA’s lecture are Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956), 484-87; Gordon H. Chang, Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China (Cambridge, MA and London, 2015), 29-34; Lynn Hudson Parsons, “Censuring Old Man Eloquent: Foreign Policy and Disunion, 1842,” Capitol Studies 3 (1975): 89-106; Steven Heath Mitton, “The Free World Confronted: The Problem of Slavery and Progress in American Foreign Relations, 1833-1844,” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2005) 42-47; Dael Norwood, “Trading in Liberty: The Politics of the American China Trade, c. 1784-1862” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012), 249-262. For Adams’s lecture as imperialist apologia, see Chung Tan, China and the Brave New World: A Study of the Origins of the Opium War (Durham, N.C., 1978), 1 and 129; Lovell, The Opium War, 79-80.

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The solution to this conundrum, I suggest, lies in recognizing how

Adams’s understanding of China was inspired not in spite of his commitment

to antislavery, but because of it. In Adams’s political imagination, the Opium

War was unfolding at a crucial juncture in world history when Britain

appeared be on the cusp of extinguishing slavery throughout the world—and

significantly, the slave South. Adams’s lecture was thus an audacious bid to

shore up the moral capital of the British empire in a conflict that threatened

to unravel the very foundations on which her abolitionism rested. In

contriving Chinese patriarchy as slavery, Adams attempted to make an

ideological intervention in the tangled polemics of his times; if I might

paraphrase David Brion Davis, it was his answer to the problem of opium in

an age of emancipation. With Britain at the helm of the “movement of mind

on this globe of earth,” Adams felt that the Opium War now formed the

“leading star” of the “cause of human freedom,” on which he pinned his

deepest hopes. What followed, of course, was something quite different.4

THE OPIUM WAR FORMALLY BEGAN IN THE SPRING OF 1839 when Commissioner Lin

Zexu detained the foreign residents of Canton, along with Charles Elliot, the

British Superintendent of the China trade, as part of his plan to permanently

shut down the opium trade. Elliot had conceived of his office whose duty was

to “by all possible means… preserve the Peace which so happily subsists 4JQA Diary, February 15, 1843; JQA Lecture, 324. I have taken the concept of “moral capital” from Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill and London, 2006).

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between the two countries.” But, by 1839, Sino-British relations were neither

peaceful nor happy. For decades, a skilled network of American, British,

Chinese and Muslim smugglers funneled British-grown Indian opium through

the inlets of the Bocca Tigris, flouting Chinese imperial edicts that explicitly

forbade them from doing so. What began as a footling affair in 1780 had, by

the eighteen-thirties, exploded into a multimillion dollar enterprise that

upended the balance of power. Lin was thus dispatched to Canton in 1839 to

put an end to the nuisance. On March 17, he demanded the surrender of all

existing opium stocks, and for every foreign trader to agree to the total

prohibition of future opium imports, with violators subject to death.5

For several days, Elliot brooded in Canton’s sweltering heat, surveying

his options. On the one hand, he personally despised the opium trade: “No

man,” he told Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, “entertains a deeper

detestation of the disgrace and sin of this forced traffic than the humble

individual who signs this dispatch.” This was not vapid sentiment. As

Superintendent, Elliot forbade British ships from carrying opium within 100

miles of the port of Canton, a decision that had cost him the “private comfort

in the society” of his fellow Britons. And in his previous assignment abroad,

Elliot dealt with another form of “forced traffic.” For two years in British

Guiana, Elliot was the colony’s “Protector of Slaves,” where he earned a

reputation for conscientiousness, calling his office a “delusion” and

5 Charles Elliot, as cited in Clagette Blake, Charles Elliot R.N. 1801-1875: A Servant of Britain Overseas (London, 1960), 26.

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demanding that the colony’s enslaved persons be granted “a Freedom they

are now fit for.” Both opium and slaves, he felt, were immoral. But Elliot

constantly felt the tug of his imperial obligations. In 1837, he sheltered a

group of British smugglers from the wrath of Chinese officials, recognizing

that opium, however disgraceful, was indispensable in lubricating the

commerce of the Pacific world. Elliot also deemed Lin’s demands excessively

churlish. So, on March 27, he made his decision. He agreed to surrender

20,283 chests of British-owned opium to Lin. At the same time, Elliot

reassured their anxious owners that they would be compensated by the

British government, fully knowing that this would force Parliament to

confront the Chinese.6

Elliot calculated correctly. As Lin eradicated 20,283 chests of

surrendered opium, the immediate concern was who would bear the loss of

£2,400,000 worth of British property now limed, salted, and sunk in the

Humen river. The Chinese certainly had no intention to do so; but neither did

the British. From their perspective, Lin had acted far too impetuously as the

envoy of a moribund empire. But could liberal, enlightened Britain really

justify a war for opium, that “man-destroying merchandize?”7

6 Charles Elliot, as cited in Susanna Hoe and Derek Roebuck, The Taking of Hong Kong: Charles and Clara Elliot in China Waters (Richmond, 1999), 52 and Blake, Charles Elliot, 18-20. 7 Thomas Dealtry, “Remarks on the Opium Trade with China,” Chinese Repository, 5 (1836), 297.

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Figure 1 This set of “admonitory pictures” by the Chinese painter Sunqua (d. 1870) depicted the opium smoker’s tragic fall from grace: a life of comfort among family spirals into indigence and eventually, death. The pictures, which first appeared in April 1837, dramatized the “opium question” and helped to animate support against the opium trade. Image Source: The Illustrated London News, December 18, 1858.

The opium question, as the concern became known, unleashed a

torrent of debate in Britain that soon flooded the halls of Parliament. Critics

of the Chinese war quickly seized upon the contradictions posed by a

Christian nation that had used the left hand of its navy to suppress the

African slave trade and its right hand to wage a drug war. Howard Malcom,

an American foreign minister, observed:

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No person can describe the horrors of the opium trade. The drug

is produced by compulsion, accompanied with miseries to the

cultivators as great as slaves endure in any part of the earth…

The influence of the drug in China is more awful and extensive

than that of rum in any country, and worse to its victims than

any outward slavery. That the government of British India should

be the prime abettors of this abominable traffic, is one of the

grand wonders of the nineteenth century. The proud escutcheon

of the nation which declaims against the slave-trade, is thus

made to bear a blot broader and darker than any other in the

Christian world.

Malcom’s passage, which circulated marvelously in Britain and America,

highlighted the searing ironies of Britain’s opium trade—a commodity grown

in conditions as miserable as “slaves endure in any part of the earth,” and

which reduced its users to a state of dependency worse “than any outward

slavery.” But his final line of critique—that opium tarnished Britain’s “proud

escutcheon” of abolition—touched off a peculiar concern. The clergyman

Algernon Thelwall, for example, worried that even if Britain prevailed

militarily over China, its victory would nonetheless undermine the “security”

of her empire, for the Opium War would only “weaken and destroy that

moral power, by which alone it is, that one hundred thousand of our

countrymen in India, can think to hold in subjection more than one hundred

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and thirty millions of the natives.” Put differently, Thelwall understood that it

was moral capital, not military strength, that sustained Britain’s rule abroad.8

Not all, however, were convinced by the moral equivalence of opium

and slavery. After British and Chinese warships exchanged fire in September

1839, Parliament debated whether to censure the incumbent Whig

government for mishandling affairs in the Far East, a measure that might

have terminated the war. There, many MPs resisted the concept of opium

slavery by ignoring it altogether. “The question between us and the Chinese

government was… not a question of morality,” said George Staunton, “but a

question whether there had been any breach of international rights or

international law.” Lin’s actions, Staunton argued, had constituted an “act of

atrocious injustice” that merited a “full justification of the measures which

had been taken to exact reparation.” With Canton’s foreign subjects

described by one merchant as “penned up… like a parcel of slaves,” MP

Thomas Macauley said that Lin’s humiliating detainment of British subjects

at Canton represented “so barbarous a proceeding” that it overrode the

relevance of the opium question.9

8 Howard Malcom, Travels in Hindustan and China, (Edinburgh, 1840), 50; A. S. Thelwall, The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China, (London, 1839), 144. 9 House of Commons Debates 53, April 7, 1840, 718-20 and 741-42; “penned up… like a parcel of slaves” is from Robert Bennet Forbes as cited in Phyllis Forbes Kerr (ed.), Letters from China: The Canton-Boston Correspondence Robert Bennet Forbes, 1838-1840 (Mystic, CT, 1996), 120-121. Historians maintain these descriptions were exaggerations, as the detainees were given an ample supply of food, water, and after a while, their household coolies. See Lovell, The Opium War, 66.

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Dissension gripped the House of Commons for three successive nights.

William Gladstone urged parliament to disavow themselves from this “great

and awful responsibility,” noting that “a war more unjust in its origin, a war

more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent

disgrace, I do not know of, and I have not read of.” Gladstone’s call went

unheeded. In the end, his rivals’ arguments that carried the day: the morality

of opium was deemed secondary to China’s wanton destruction of British

property. With a slender majority of nine votes, Britain sanctioned a war for

drugs.10

DURING THE WINTER OF 1839, many Americans followed the crisis in China with

great interest. Coverage of the Opium War appeared in newspapers in

Raleigh, Washington, New York, Richmond, Boston, Philadelphia, and

Baltimore; the New Yorker called it possibly “the most remarkable event of

the nineteenth century.” But some of the war’s vigilant spectators were

Southern legislators such as Francis Pickens and John C. Calhoun, who feared

its potentially devastating ramifications for their way of life.11

It began for them on August 1, 1833, when Britain pronounced the end

of slavery in her West Indian colonies. The emancipation of 800,000 slaves

set many Southerners into a panic. It was, in their eyes, a portent of a global

10 House of Commons Debates 53, April 8, 1840, 820. 11 “China and Great Britain,” New Yorker, May 9, 1840, 123; for national coverage, see “The Opium Trade,” Niles’ National Register 6:25 (Aug 1839), 389; Richmond Enquirer (Richmond, VA), June 9, 1840; The North Carolina Standard (Raleigh, NC), October 30, 1839; Pilot and Transcript (Baltimore, MD) January 2, 1841; The New York Herald (New York, NY), December 26, 1843. See also Norwood, Trading in Liberty, 239-42.

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conflict to come, one that pitted the world’s foremost imperial power against

their peculiar system. Waxing apocalyptic, Congressman Francis Pickens

feared that Britain would turn the South into a “howling wilderness… wrapt

in conflagration.” As Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, he

commissioned a fact-finding mission to China in 1839 with the aim of

protecting American interests following the “forcible introduction of opium”

by British merchants.12

Contrary to what an earlier generation of historians surmised, the

threat of an abolitionist Britain was grounded in fact more than fantasy.

Starting from the Revolutionary War, the British had developed the practice

of emancipating U.S.-owned slaves as contrabands of war. Though formal

hostilities with Britain had ceased in 1814, Britain’s long reach across the

North American continent continued to stoke anxieties. In the far West, they

held claims to Oregon territory; in the independent republic of Texas, Britain

sent diplomatic agents (including Charles Elliot, the instigator of the Opium

War) to cajole the then-independent republic toward embracing their

program of free trade and free labor; and in 1838, border disputes along

Maine and New Brunswick triggered a diplomatic crisis known as the

Aroostook War, a sober reminder that the United States still shared the North

American continent with the world’s leading power.

12 Francis Pickens as cited in Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA and London, 2016), 20; Pickens, Congressional Globe, 26th Cong., 1st Sess, Volume 8, No. 11, February 11, 1840, 172.

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What proved to be more vexing for Southerners, however, was the

looming British presence around the coastwise slave trade. In acquiring

Spanish Florida in 1821, Southerners thought they had quashed the region’s

main haven for escaping slaves. But a series of maritime disputes in the

1830s proved that Florida’s surrounding waters were just as threatening. The

Comet, Encomium and Enterprise were each slave brigs which, after

encountering hazardous weather, took refuge in the British-controlled ports.

The authorities, following a precedent established by Somerset, manumitted

their slave cargoes under the premise that the slaves had breathed Britain’s

“free air.” Slave-owners, outraged, sued for compensation. In January 1837,

foreign secretary Lord Palmerston responded that the British would only

recompense slaveholders of the Comet and the Encomium, but not the

Enterprise, because the latter had landed in Port Hamilton after August 1,

1833, the day that Britain officially sanitized her West Indian possessions

from slavery. Palmerston’s verdict thus transformed the strip of water

surrounding the Floridian peninsula into a cordon of freedom from which

slaves could escape and attain their freedom.

The Southern planter class scrambled to find a response. In March

1840, they rallied around John C. Calhoun, who introduced in the Senate a

series of resolutions that sought to strengthen the slaveholders’ rights in

international disputes. Calling the outcome of the Enterprise case “one of the

greatest outrages ever committed on the rights of individuals by a civilized

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nation,” Calhoun mounted a spectacular defense of slaveholders’ rights in a

speech that garnered widespread attention.13

In his oration, Calhoun accused Palmerston of misdirection by drawing

attention to the 1833 Emancipation Act. The timing of the emancipation was

immaterial; rather, Calhoun said the heart of the dispute was whether

slavery could be deemed a “violation of the laws of nations.” By extending

Somerset’s reach across the Atlantic, Calhoun believed Britain had stumbled

into a legal dilemma where she either considered her own enlightened laws

“paramount to the laws of nations,” or if she had suddenly decided to rewrite

the law of nations of her own accord. If, on the one hand, Britain decided to

supersede the law of nations by citing the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, this

would “virtually abolishing the entire system of international laws, ” resulting

in “universal violence, discord, and conflict.” No other nation had ever

attempted to make its own doctrines a linchpin of international

jurisprudence. On the other hand, if Britain lacked the legal authority to

breach international law, Calhoun asserted “the greatest slave-dealer on

earth” lacked the moral capital to reshape the law of nations into a charter of

human freedom. The whole of British India, Calhoun said, was but “one

magnificent plantation,” where her “power is far more unlimited and

despotic than that of any Southern planter over his slaves.” Imperial

abolitionism, he declared, was a contradiction in terms, a “spectacle” of

13 John C. Calhoun, Speeches of John C. Calhoun (New York, 1843), 378-90.

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hypocrisy, since an antislavery Britain could not sustain the right of “one

nation to hold another in subjection” without “war[ring] against herself.”14

Then, bringing his address to a climax, Calhoun spotlighted the Opium

War. “At this moment,” he said, Britain was “preparing an extensive

expedition against the oldest of nations.” This “venerable and peaceful

people,” Calhoun said, were now victims of a war “to force on them the use

of opium” by an ostensibly “Christian” nation. Echoing other critics of the

war, Calhoun drew an explicit connection between opium and slavery. Opium

was a commodity cultivated not only by “millions of slaves,” but a

“pernicious and poisonous drug” which, by sapping its victims of the “powers

and functions of mind and body,” induced slavery of a different order.

“Strange” indeed were Britain’s ways, said Calhoun, “making millions of

slaves in one hemisphere… while in another, interposing, in a flood of

sympathy, in behalf of a band of barbarous slaves, with hands imbrued with

blood!” With this utterance, the South’s greatest spokesperson for slavery

transmogrified into a passionate champion of Chinese sovereignty.15

Calhoun’s resolution passed the Senate, but its eventual effect on

British policy was negligible. Half a year later, British authorities freed the 38

slaves of the Hermosa after it ran aground in the Bahamas. Then, in

November 1841, slaveholders’ deepest fears were realized when Madison 14 Ibid., 383-88. “Imperial abolitionism” is a phrase taken from Karp, This Vast Southern Empire, 24-29. 15 Calhoun, Speeches, 389.

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Washington led a mutiny on the Creole, altered its destination from New

Orleans to Nassau, and freed himself along with 130 other slaves. The

greatest slave rebellion in American history, in other words, took place in the

same month that John Quincy Adams spoke about Opium War. The

coincidence was not lost on many.

Figure 2 A sketch taken from John Barrow’s Travels in China, which Adams read avidly. It depicts an idyllic village scene, with a woman smoking opium. Image Source: British Museum, London.

ON DECEMBER 30, 1840, Adams returned to his desk in Washington D.C. after

spending the day at church. He was working on his testimony for the

Amistad case when his attention was “diverted from the Amistad Africans, to

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John Barrow’s Travels in China,” which “absorbed” him “for the rest of the

day.”16

That winter marked a hectic season for Adams. Outside of his regular

commitments in Congress, Adams had committed to representing the forty-

nine Mendi Africans of the Amistad at the Supreme Court, all the while

composing a special essay on China for the North American Review. Adams

recognized, of course, that his work on Amistad had far more significance.

Nonetheless, as his diary attested, his mind often wandered to China as a

form of diversion. Barrow’s Travels in China was a favorite: the Briton’s

“marvelous account,” noted Adams, depicted a faraway realm “realized over

three hundred millions of population, and continuing from time immemorial,”

with “the extremes of civilization and of the savage state blended together in

one condition of human existence.” Like the daguerreotypes of Adams’s day,

the China of Barrow’s telling was wondrous to behold, a curio frozen in

time.17

Adams was a prolific writer. In just three months, he produced over

130 pages of legal testimony on behalf of the Amistad captives. Adams

struggled, however, to complete his essay on China, missing a deadline in

December. Having never set foot in China, he relied on a composite of

largely British sources for information: travelogues, memoirs, political

16 JQA Diary, December 13, 1840.17 JQA Diary, December 13, 1840.

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writings, parliamentary debates, and diplomatic correspondences. He worked

on his manuscript intermittently for over a year, and presented a working

draft to the Massachusetts Historical Society in November.18

Word about Adams’s lecture drew a throng of eager listeners, the

largest crowd “ever assembled” in Boston’s Masonic Hall. The principal

question, Adams said, was the “justice of the cause between the two

parties.” Did Britain have a right to wage war on China? After an eighty-

minute discourse on natural rights, international law and the history of Sino-

British relations, he reached a stunning conclusion. “You have perhaps been

surprised to hear me answer Britain,” Adams said. “Britain has the righteous

cause… sought in the natural rights of man.”19

“Surprise” was an understatement—a “sensation” was what Adams

later recorded of the crowd’s reaction. Adams confounded his audience on

multiple counts. To begin with, he defied popular opinion, which sympathized

with the Chinese. It was “Christian” Britain, penned the poet William Tappan,

who used opium’s “sensual charm” to make China her “viler slave.” Second,

Adams discarded his reputation as an adversary of British imperialism.

During his tenure as Secretary of State and then President, Adams had

formulated a policy of checking British influence, circumscribing their

territorial claims in North America, opposing impressment, and formulating

18 JQA to John G. Palfrey, 21 December 1840, Reel 154, AFP. 19 Boston Courier (Boston, MA), November 25, 1841; JQA Lecture, 324-25, my italics.

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the Monroe Doctrine. Yet, in a remarkable turnaround, Adams now welcomed

their intervention. But most astonishing of all was the substance of his

argument. The “self-evident principle of human rights”—the very fulcrum of

his celebrated Amistad testimony—now served, somehow, to justify the

Opium War. To make such a tendentious case, Adams took to proving three

statements: one, that slavery was against the law of nature; second, that the

law of nations practiced by Christian nations authorized abolition; and third,

that China, being a despotic slave empire, warranted intervention from

Britain just as its Royal Navy had intervened in the African slave trade.

Proving these claims, Adams hoped, would string together Britain’s designs

in the Americas, Africa and Asia together into a coherent whole, legitimating

her abolitionism.20

Establishing the first statement was straightforward enough. “The

existence of Slavery,” Adams declared, “is incompatible with that Law of

Nature and Nature’s God, which has given all men the inalienable Right to

Liberty.”21 Comfortable on home ground, Adams articulated a position

already consonant with his Massachusetts audience.

Adams then moved onto more contested territory. The law of nations,

as scholars have shown, was a concept in flux, more a set of evolving 20 JQA Diary, November 24, 1841; The Liberator (Boston, MA), April 10, 1840; John Quincy Adams, Argument of John Quincy Adams, before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of the United States, appellants, vs. Cinque, and others, Africans, captured in the schooner Amistad, (New York, 1841), 82.21 JQA Lecture, 305.

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practices than codified doctrine. Some of Adams’s contemporaries—notably

John Calhoun—thus dismissed the law of nations as empty verbiage. In

contrast, Adams rejected any interpretation of the law of nations as

realpolitik, which in his view, was a “bastard law of nations” concocted by

Calhoun and the slaveholding class. Instead, he was profoundly influenced by

the American jurist Henry Wheaton in his understanding of international law.

Supplanting Hugo Grotius’s more universal conception of the law of nations,

Wheaton developed a contextual and particularistic theory of international

law, which held that the “international law of Christendom”—the “principles

of natural justice” that recognized states as “moral beings”—applied only to

the “one great family” of Europe and the “American nations which have

sprung from the European stock.” Following Wheaton’s footsteps, Adams

believed that the interventions of Britain, America and the other Christian

powers were vindicated by their moral objectives. As he later declared, the

American Revolution served as a “vital spark” that propagated a new

“Christian Law of Nations,” igniting a wildfire of liberty around the world that

lifted the principle of “illimitable human rights” above the principle of

“illimitable sovereignty.”22

22 Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law: With a Sketch of the History of the Science (Philadelphia, 1836), 44-45; “bastard law of nations” is from JQA Diary, January 2, 1843; JQA Lecture, 307; for the Revolution as a “vital spark,” see “Letter from the Hon. John Quincy Adams,” National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, NY), August 24, 1843. For background, see Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776-1814 (Madison, 1993); Mark W. Janis, America and the Law of Nations, 1776-1939 (New York, 2010).

20


This paved the way for Adams to make his third and most controversial

claim: that China was a slave empire, the next object of liberation in the

“movement of mind on this globe of Earth.” The “whole Nation” of China, he

said, was “one great family of which the Emperor is the father,” whose

“authority is unlimited.” China was a “nation of slaves,” he reasoned, not

because of her reliance on slave labor, but her antediluvian notions of

“hereditary, patriarchal despotism” that positioned her at “the centre of the

terraqueous globe” and “superior” to the “great, powerful and enlightened

Nations of Europe.” If slavery meant the rejection of equality between

persons—and if nations were but the agglomeration of many persons—

Adams’s conclusion was that China’s denial of “the equality of other Nations

with herself” entailed a form of despotism tantamount to slavery. Adams

hence described Lord Macartney, Britain’s first envoy to China, as having

been reduced to a “vassal… sent by his master to do homage.” It fueled his

outrage regarding the “Ko-Tow,” which he saw as the “Chinese principle of

exaction symbolical” and the ultimate reason for the conflict. Thus, more

than anywhere else in the world, Adams claimed that China was where “the

Patriarchal system of Sir Robert Filmer, flourishes in all its glory.” And by the

same token, Adams deemed accusations of “opium slavery” as mere

hyperbole, opining that the “quarrel” over opium was “no more the cause of

the War, than the throwing overboard of Tea in Boston Harbor was the cause

of the American Revolution.”23

23 JQA Lecture, 307-9, 313-324; the phrase “nation of slaves” appears in JQA to James Brooks, 20 January 1842, Reel 154, AFP.

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Figure 3 This excised portion of Adams’s manuscript, which surfaced only in 1910, revealed that Adams had intended to make Christian abolitionism the main theme of his remarks on the Opium War. Adams omitted the section, probably fearing it too controversial. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts.

Though Adams fulminated against China’s disregard for human liberty

and the “rights of human nature,” he curiously omitted descriptions of

slavery—at least in the conventional sense. This would, at first glance,

appear to be perplexing: John Barrow’s Travels contained ample descriptions

of indigent Chinese parents selling their “children into perpetual slavery”

that would have furnished the perfect illustration. But apart from a

perfunctory mention of “idol-worship, polygamy, [and] infanticide,” Adams’s

notion of China as a despotic slave empire was, in the end, rather outré. It

implied that China’s imperial system, founded in an ethnocentric worldview,

22


constituted slavery. But Adams never specified what unfreedoms, exactly,

were being abolished, apart from China’s restrictive port system.24

Revisiting the archival record provides some clarification. The physical

manuscript that Adams used for his address showed that he had excised a

crucial paragraph before its delivery. Its omission was telling. On the one

hand, it captured the lecture’s overarching theme. Appearing at the

beginning of his address, Adams excoriated the “easy consciences” of his

countrymen for tolerating slavery in spite of the “self-evident truths of Man’s

inalienable rights.” He inveighed against how Americans openly condemned

the international slave trade as an “abomination” while refusing to deal with

slavery at home. These remarks showed that Adams primary concern was

less about China and more about abolitionism’s fate in the aftermath of the

Opium War. But the redacted paragraph also disclosed a fatal link in the

chain of Adams’s reasoning. In writing that “perhaps poverty is Slavery all

the world over,” or that “labour is slavery,” or that “Christianity

accommodates itself well with slavery,” Adams satirized popular arguments

put forward by proslavery ideologues. He recognized that by broadening the

definition of slavery to encompass all forms of human immiseration,

Southern slaveholders hoped to disclaim themselves from condemnation.

But as we have seen, Adams’s attempt to replenish Britain’s moral capital in

the Opium War relied on a similar tactic of straining the meaning of slavery

to such an extent that opium smugglers were recast as abolitionists and 24 John Barrow, Travels in China (Philadelphia, 1805), 97.

23


China made to appear no different from the slave south. It also sidelined the

problem of “opium slavery” and ignored the upheavals caused by opium’s

blithe commodification. These interpretative liberties, from Adams’s point of

view, were the necessary price of shielding Britain from Southern

accusations of “hypocritical abolitionism.” The effect would have comic if it

was not also consequential.25

AFTER HIS EIGHTY-MINUTE ADDRESS, the men and women of Boston who had

gathered that evening greeted Adams cordially. Abbott Lawrence, a

prominent Massachusetts businessman, requested a copy of Adams’s

manuscript to share with his wife who could not make the lecture. Adams

then gave a repeat performance to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful

Knowledge on Friday. Though the hall was “scarcely filled” the second time,

the lecture was nonetheless “well received.” Adams heaved a sigh of relief—

the hostility that he so dreaded did not come to pass. “From my great

anxiety respecting this lecture I am now released,” he told himself.26

His declaration, however, was premature. Within a week, copies of his

lecture were reprinted in newspapers in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington

D.C., Richmond, Charleston, New Hampshire, Maryland and New York, where

25 John Quincy Adams, “Correspondence relating to China, presented to both Houses of Parliament...”, December 1 1840, Microfilms of the Adams Papers, Reel 516, Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: MA, 1959), 3. 26 JQA Diary, November 22, 24 and 26, 1841.

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it was rent to shreds. “Our readers know the high respect in which we hold

Mr. Adams,” wrote the New York Spectator, “[b]ut they knew, too, how often

we have had occasion to mourn and marvel at his eccentricities,” and

“can appreciate the wonder and regret with which we chronicle this last

addition to the number.” The Philadelphia Inquirer remarked “that one

should so noted for his philanthropic views should become the apologist of

Great Britain in her present warfare against China, is indeed remarkable,”

and predicted that the lecture would “cast a slight shadow over the exalted

reputation hitherto enjoyed by the sage of Quincy.” One reader of a

Baltimore newspaper wrote he was “humbled on seeing such a specimen of

American ethics sent abroad into the world.”27

The rejection of Adams’s position on the Opium War went beyond

casting aspersions. Several authors took on Adams’s claims, deeming his

notion of a “Christian law of nations” a travesty of reasoning. There was “no

glaring violation of the law of nations,” wrote the jurist Francis Wharton,

other “than the successful attempt to cram down [China’s] throat, by force,

an article which she had deliberately refused to receive.” Another writer

accused Adams of writing about China “through the jaundiced eyes of an

Occidental philosopher and jurist.” The Arcturus, a New York journal,

similarly expressed that it maintained “in opposition to Mr. Adams, and upon

the authority of all the elementary writers on the law of nations, that each 27 New York Spectator (New York, NY), November 27, 1841; “Mr. Adams and the China Question,” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), December 13, 1841; “Mr. Adams and the Opium War,” The Sun (Baltimore, MD), December 12, 1841.

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nation has the absolute right to determine to herself, whether she will have

any, and what, commercial or other intercourse with any other nation.”28

But some caught Adams’s larger message. The abolitionist David Lee

Child, editor of The National Anti-Slavery Standard, came to Adams’s

defense. “I have heard, and read several criticisms on this performance,

some of which appeared to me savage, and none of them entirely just,” he

wrote. Child recognized the stakes: defaming the British would only play into

slaveholders’ arguments about Britain’s alleged perfidy and weaken the

cause of abolition worldwide. While Child felt that Adams had not

satisfactorily justified England’s war in his November performance, “that

there is a justification, according to the law of nations,” he had “no

reasonable doubt.” Child also agreed with Adams’s portrayal of China as a

despotic system resembling the slave South. China’s “blind and unreasoning

adherence to a system, which they call patriarchal,” Child said, was “not

unlike” the “American ‘patriarchal’ system.” Like slaves on a plantation, he

noted ordinary Chinese were frequently victims of arbitrary justice, subject to

the “laws of a petty despot.” Since this was the case, Child also deemed

their emancipation due.29

28 China and the Chinese Peace,” Hunt’s Merchant Magazine 8 (1843) 205; W.A., “Great Britain and China,” Christian Examiner 32 (July 1842), 282 and 312; “The City Article: England and China,” Arcturus 3 (1842): 146. 29 David Lee Child, “Mr. Adams’s Lecture on the Chinese War,” The Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, NY), February 17, 1842.

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Unsurprisingly, Adams’s most perceptive readers were his proslavery

opponents. The Globe, a Democratic organ, glimpsed right through Adams’s

message. Though many supposed, it wrote, that Adams was “fast

approaching a state of second childhood” in his “annunciation of such

strange doctrine,” The Globe dismissed such a “hypothesis.” Rather, it called

attention to the “diabolical direction” of the lecture. “Mr. Adams knows what

he is about. He had his object in advocating the war with China” in order to

“prepar[e] the way for the application of the new ADAMS code to the great

question of the right of search, now at issue between the United States and

England… Every body must see that the principles which Mr. Adams

inculcated in his Boston lecture, if once engrafted on the law of nations, will

place the rights of the United States at the mercy of the ‘Christian League.’”

If people were befuddled by Adams’s jarring invocation of human rights to

justify the Opium War, The Globe noted this only proved that “the tone, the

circumstances, and the very phrases” used in the lecture “were intended for

application to questions again emerging at home, and not for the purpose of

enlightening China by an abstract theory.” The article concluded

forebodingly, pointing out that Adams, Edward Everett and Daniel Webster—

three Whig politicians from Massachusetts—now occupied prominent foreign

policy positions, poised to inaugurate Adams’s “new system of international

law.”30

30 The Globe (Washington, D.C.), December 11 and 27, 1841.

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The Globe was reacting to a series of events that roiled Congress in the

winter of 1841. Just as Adams’s lecture was making rounds around the

country, the slave brig Creole arrived in New Orleans with only five of its

original slave cargo. The rest of the slaves, Congress learned, had been freed

at Nassau, despite the fact that it was a violent mutiny, not turbulent

weather, that brought them there. Then, on December 20, Britain, Austria,

France, Prussia and Russia temporarily agreed to a convention known as the

Quintuple Treaty. Architected by Lord Palmerston—Britain’s Foreign

Secretary who authorized the war in China—the Treaty granted its

signatories the mutual right to search vessels suspected of engaging in the

slave trade across a vast area that included the American coastwise slave

route, thereby fulfilling, in other words, of what The Globe had called the

“new ADAMS code.” Then, in another blow to their cause, Adams was

appointed Chairman of the House of Foreign Committee later that winter.

Unlike his Anglophobic predecessor, Caleb Cushing, they feared Adams much

more pliant to British interests. Adams felt an affiliation with his fellow Whigs

across the Atlantic; to have one so enamored with British notions of

“freedom” take a prominent foreign policy role was anathema to both

proslavery Democrats and anti-British Whigs.

During the new year, Adams’s opponents staged a dramatic attempt to

unseat him. On January 24, 1842, after Adams introduced a petition from

forty-six residents from Haverhill, Massachusetts that proposed measures to

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“peaceably dissolve the Union of these States,” his rivals seized the

opportunity to table a motion of censure. Adams had clearly “disgraced his

country,” said Kentucky Representative Thomas Marshall, by using the

petition to sanction a virtual civil war. For two weeks, Adams and his

opponents traded invectives. A major point of contention was Adams’s

apparent lack of patriotism as evidenced in his recent remarks on the Opium

War. Virginia Congressman Henry A. Wise shamed Adams for being someone

“who could tolerate and defend now waged by England—a war found

expressly on slavery of the severest kind.” He remarked that Adams’s real

objective had been to demonstrate that it was “lawful” for Britain “to enter a

crusade against another nation for purposes of philanthropy,” giving her

license to eventually “[set] free three millions of oppressed human beings” in

the South in a war “dictated by humanity and philanthropy.” Wise

admonished Britain to “cease to make war on China, to force upon the

harmless Chinese which her slaves had raised, and let men calling

themselves American statesmen and patriots cease to defend such a war.”31

Wise’s remarks showed once again that, more than anyone else, it was

Adams’s proslavery enemies who had comprehended his Boston message. At

stake for the U.S. in the Opium War was less the future of Sino-American

relations than the ideological integrity of abolitionism: if the Opium War was

a conflict “found expressly on slavery,” as Congressman Wise held, the

31 Congressional Globe, 27th Cong., 2nd Sess. January 27, 1842, 171-72.

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British could not, in good faith, claim they were motivated by “humanity and

philanthropy” in their suppression of the American slave trade. And if Britain

had contravened the law of nations by warring against the Chinese without

just cause, the British lacked the legitimacy to cite the very same principle in

drafting the Quintuple Treaty or by manumitting the Creole’s enslaved cargo.

An empire of opium could not at the same time be an empire against slavery

—a tension that American diplomats would skillfully exploit in their

negotiations with the British.32

The censure attempt on Adams never succeeded. The entire ordeal, in

fact, worked to Adams’s favor, who used the opportunity to publicly

disparage his proslavery rivals. Victory, however, was short-lived, as Adams

discerned other problems on the horizon. In the 1841 election, the (British)

Whig Party sustained enormous losses in the House of Commons. Adams

eyed their successors charily. He especially distrusted the new Foreign

Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, whom he regarded as half-hearted on

abolitionism. In May 1843, Adams told Lewis Tappan, the New York

abolitionist, that while he still “believed the freedom of this country and of all

mankind depended upon the formal, open and avowed interference of Great

Britain,” he “distrusted the sincerity of the present British administration in

the anti-slavery cause.”33

32 In his letter to Edward Everett, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, tellingly instructed him to use opium as an example to confound the British. See Daniel Webster, as cited in Jay William, The Creole Case, and Mr. Webster’s Despatch: With the Comments of the N.Y. American (New York: New-York American, 1842), 9. 33 JQA Diary, May 31, 1843.

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Adams’s pessimism was confirmed in August 1842 with the signing of

the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. The Treaty put to bed a number of territorial

disputes between Britain and the United States that could otherwise have

spilled into all-out war. Adams, however, denounced the treaty as

“diplomatic swindling.” He saw Article 10 of the Treaty, in particular, as a

betrayal of British principles. The article stipulated that the United States and

Britain would cooperate to extradite fugitives across borders, which Adams

read as a capitulation to Southern demands for the return of runaway slaves.

The Treaty also neglected to address the right of search, revoking its original

design to extend the bounds of the Quintuple Treaty to disrupt the U.S.

coastwise slave trade. “All my suspicions of the duplicity of the British

ministers... are but strongly confirmed,” Adams despaired. After its signing,

the Creole marked the last maritime slave revolt until the Civil War. And

when the British failed to intervene in the American annexation of Texas,

Adams considered his efforts a complete failure, and implored God to forgive

him “for all the errors and delinquencies of my life.”34

SO HOW SHOULD HISTORIANS UNDERSTAND John Quincy Adams and the Opium

War? Evidently, in his comprehension of Sino-British affairs, Adams faltered

on two accounts. For one, Adams never succeeded in using his lecture to

galvanize public support for the British war effort in China. The interpretative 34 JQA Diary, July 1, 1844 and November 4, 1846. For background, see Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 108-111; Mitton, “Free World Confronted,” 95-98; Arthur T. Downey, The Creole Affair (London, 2014), 111-129.

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leaps he undertook were too fantastic, and as his critics rightly alleged,

Adams grossly underplayed the significance of the opium question. Many

writers, including Karl Marx, regarded “opium slavery” as more real than

metaphorical and the slave trade as more “merciful” than the opium trade.

Thus, unlike other non-addictive commodities, opium carried a freight of

moral meanings too proximate to slavery that thwarted his attempt to use

the same language. Secondly, Adams miscalculated the depth of Britain’s

commitment to abolitionism. While antislavery sentiment was certainly

pervasive in Victorian Britain, it was not far-reaching enough to sanction the

series of military interventions with the slave societies of Cuba, Brazil, Texas,

and the U.S. South that Adams so desired. By supporting Britain’s role in the

Opium War, Adams’s hoped in November 1841 to legitimate her philosophy

of “imperial abolitionism” so that it could be mobilized against the South.

This faith, however, proved sorely misplaced.35

But if Adams’s hopes were unfulfilled, his influence on Sino-American

affairs would nonetheless persist long after his death. Despite turning down

an opportunity to serve as the first U.S. ambassador to China, Adams used

his clout as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations to secure

$40,000 from Congress to send a diplomatic mission to China. The mission

culminated in the Treaty of Wanghia, a watershed agreement that secured

for Americans the rights of extraterritoriality, access to Chinese treaty ports

35 See Karl Marx, “Trade or Opium?”, New York Daily Tribune, September 20, 1858.

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and the expansion of missionaries’ rights. In articulating the reasons for the

mission, Adams repeated the same themes of his 1841 lecture. Though

conceding that access to China had been “obtained by conquest,” Adams

maintained that the Opium War was nonetheless a war for the “equal rights

of independent nations” that overturned China’s “insolent and absurd

assumption of despotic supremacy.” Adams was careful this time to eschew

any mention of slavery, which would immediately cut off support for the

mission. Adams did manage, on the other hand, to smuggle a statement

about the sanctity of international law practiced by the “nations of

Christendom.” “Right and wrong,” he said, “are dependent, not upon the

extent of surface over which they spread… but upon principles of eternal

justice transcending the bounds of space and time, surrounding the globe,

and binding upon the conscience of every living soul upon its face.” Those

present did not miss the intimation. Whether in China, the “central darkness

of Africa,” or the U.S. South, the blinding light of equality applied to all

persons and jurisdictions, slave or free.36

Apart from his diplomatic legacy, Adams’s conceptualization of the

Opium War was ideologically significant, marking, as historian Gordon Chang

writes, a “turning point in the American attitude toward China.” It provided a

means for Adams’s successors in Congress to gloss over the problem of

opium by conceiving of it as no real problem at all, in light of the promised

36 See JQA Diary, June 2, 1842; “Relations with China and Hawaiian Islands,” Niles Register 63 (1843), 378-79.

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benefits that “Christian liberty” would bring to that “benighted empire,”

China. Dismissed at first as insouciance, Adams’s account eventually gained

purchase by the time of Second Opium War (1856-1860), and continued to

be cited as late as 1882 on matters of US-China foreign policy. Though

“[Adams’s] views were ridiculed or repudiated by many when delivered,”

observed Massachusetts politician Josiah Quincy in 1860, “they are to this

day acknowledged; and are made some of the chief grounds of the

justification of that invasion of the Chinese empire now apparently in

successful progress.” But where Adams may have contrived Chinese

patriarchal slavery as a means to justify Britain’s abolitionism in 1841, his

successors would appropriate the same language for different ends, using

abolitionism to justify antipathy against the Chinese. Historian Dael Norwood

suggests, for example, that the debate between Calhoun and Adams

inadvertently set the stage for the “coolie” controversy in the late 1850s, by

formalizing notions of the Chinese as a slave-like race incapable of

republican freedom. Historian Moon-Ho Jung also notes that the Republican

Party—Adams’s spiritual successors—were the first to call for the prohibition

of Chinese labor against the “teeming, seething slave pens of China,” a

decision which later “justified and fueled U.S. expansionism in Asia and the

Caribbean.” Where abolitionism and orientalism were once thought to be

outrageously incongruent, their fusion would become natural, almost

connate.37 37 Chang, Fateful Ties, 32; Norwood, “Trading in Liberty,” 347; Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, 2006), 11 and 20. See, for example, “Enforcing A Treaty,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1882. Josiah Quincy,

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Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams (Boston, 1860), 336. For background on the Second Opium War, see J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China (New York, 1998).

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