As early as 1836 John Quincy Adams, speaking in Congress, had said: "From the instant that your slaveholding States become the theatre of war, from that instant the war-powers of the Constitution extend to interference with the institution of slavery in every way in which it can be interfered with." And in 1842 he had expressed the idea more strongly and fully: "Whether the war be civil, servile, or foreign, I lay this down as the law of nations--I say that the military authority takes for the time the place of all municipal institutions, slavery among the rest. Under that state of things, so far from its being true that the States where slavery exists have the exclusive management of the subject, not only the President of the United States, but the commander of the army has power to order the universal emancipation of the slaves." The poets, wiser than the politicians, had long foretold the great struggle and its results. James Russell Lowell, before he was thirty years of age, wrote: "Out from the land of bondage 'tis decreed our slaves shall go, And signs to us are offered, as erst to Pharaoh; If we are blind, their exodus, like Israel's of yore, Through a Red Sea is doomed to be, whose surges are of gore." Twenty years later he saw his prediction fulfilled. But generally the anticipation was that the institution would be extinguished through a general rising of the slaves themselves. Thus Henry W. Longfellow wrote in 1841: {185} "There is a poor, blind Samson in this land, Shorn of his strength, and bound in bonds of steel, Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand, And shake the pillars of this commonweal, Till the vast temple of our liberties A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies." It seems a singular fact that throughout the war there was no insurrection of the slaves. They were all anxious enough for liberty, and ran away from bondage whenever they could; but, except by regular enlistment in the National army, there never was any movement among them to assist in the emancipation of their race.