liberties implications of the gag played directly into the northern “slave power” argument about
southern domination (Fogel 1989, 340-341; Riker 1982, 221).
The adoption of the gag rule, then, fragmented and redirected—but did not eliminate—
the House slavery controversy. Those who opposed the gag found a panoply of ways to attack it.
Cleverly-worded petitions continued to be presented, mostly as an effort to call public attention
to the issue (Mark 1998, 2225). John Quincy Adams (W-MA) was among a handful of
representatives who led the charge against the gag rule, offering petitions against the rule itself
and—in thinly disguised form—against slavery, keeping passions surrounding the issue heated.
The continuing controversy surrounding the gag rule and abolition petitions made the
renewal of the gag a critical priority for many Democrats and most southerners in the late 1830s.
The votes on renewing the gag rule became a regular, contentious feature of the first several
months of most House sessions. Both the lame-duck session
th
Congress and the first
regular session of the 25
th
Congress began with a flurry of abolition petitions, but in each case, a
gag rule similar to the Pinckney resolution was adopted after several weeks of conflict. The
lame duck session of the 25
th
Congress, however, began with nearly immediate adoption of the
gag rule before the petition debate could even begin (Ludlum 1941, 208-214).
The first regular session of the 26
th
Congress began in January 1840 with a significant
shift in the politics of the gag rule. The session began as the others had, with attempts to
introduce abolition petitions along with days of debate about a gag rule. But the outcome would
6
Adams’ petitions included a request for an examination of “how to make effective the constitutional guarantee of a
republican form of government, when 13 slave States had governments ‘absolutely despotic, onerous, and
oppressive’ to a great part of their populations,” a suggestion for making “an amicable division of the Union by a
line running between the free and the slave States,” and a proposal for “the removal of the seat of government
farther North, where the principles of the Declaration of Independence ‘are not treated as a mere rhetorical flourish’”
(Ludlum 1941, 213, 217). See Miller 1995 for a detailed examination of Adams’ strategy during the entire period.
7
During this period, the House usually began its regular sessions in December of the odd-numbered years; there was
also usually a lame-duck session running from December of the even-numbered years through March of the odd-
numbered years.
8
Convention