This Day in Congressional History (“Gag Rule” Resolutions on Anti-Slavery Petitions Introduced by Northerner)

December 11, 1838—Just as it had done for the last two years with similar variations on “The Gag Rule,” Congress acted to table abolitionist petitions without a hearing. It was to be expected that the five resolutions would be offered by the Democratic Party, which had first sought to curtail discussion of the contentious issue of slavery under President Andrew Jackson.

This time, however, the Congressman offering them was a Northerner, Charles Atherton of New Hampshire. The serious displeasure that Atherton incurred with colleagues from his section can be gauged by the fact that of all the resolutions that sustained the Gag Rule from 1836 through 1844, only Atherton had any named after him.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln implicitly recognized the shared responsibility of both sections of the country for slavery when he noted that God “gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came.” In its most hideous form, he could have had in mind the “triangular trade” of molasses-to-rum-to-slaves among New England, Africa and the South.

But the “slave power” in Washington could not have existed without the political acquiescence of Northerners such as former President James Buchanan and, in the case of the Gag Rule, Charles Atherton.

In a prior post, I discussed the aborted career of the young South Carolina congressman who got the Gag Rule started in the first place, James Henry Hammond. Like Hammond, Atherton briefly achieved his dream of higher office (in Atherton’s case, the U.S. Senate), but both are better known for their infamous association not just with slavery but also with one of the most blatantly unconstitutional measures ever passed by Congress.

The fight against the Gag Rule has become known as the shining hour of ex-President John Quincy Adams. But the multiyear fight against curtailing the American people’s constitutionally guaranteed right of petition deserves to be far better known than it is, contends William Lee Miller, author of Arguing About Slavery, a history of the Gag Rule controversy.

That controversy is finally receiving attention from historians such as Miller. I was astonished to find out, for instance, that, for all its storytelling genius, Arthur Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson (1945) does not include a page on the subject.

By the early 1830s, the formation of Northern groups such as the American Anti-Slavery Society thrust the slavery issue squarely onto the agenda of Capitol Hill. Much like the abortion question nowadays, politicians by and large groaned at introducing a moral question into a realm where compromise and old-fashioned political horsetrading were the preferred means of operation. They had to find a way to avoid putting this vexatious question before the public. Thus, the “gag rule.”

Atherton’s resolutions represented the first and only instance when a Northern pressed these rules. The journal of abolitionist Congressman Joshua Giddings recorded “hissings and murmurs of contempt” when Atherton introduced it. In later years, Atherton’s infamy would be assured when he came to be nicknamed “Gag” Atherton.