"Mr. Chairman," continued Mr. Adams, "are you ready for all these wars? A Mexican war; a war with Great Britain, if not with France; a general Indian war; a servile war; and, as an inevitable consequence of them all, a civil war;--for it must ultimately terminate in a war of colors, as well as of races. And do you imagine that while, with your eyes open, you are wilfully kindling these wars, and then closing your eyes and blindly rushing into them,--do you imagine that, while in the very nature of things your own Southern and South-western States must be the Flanders of these complicated wars, the battle-field upon which the last great conflict must be fought between slavery and emancipation,--do you imagine that your Congress will have no constitutional authority to interfere with the institution of slavery, _in any way_, in the states of this confederacy? Sir, they must and will interfere with it, perhaps to sustain it by war, perhaps to abolish it by treaties of peace; and they will not only possess the constitutional power so to interfere, but they will be bound in duty to do it by the express provisions of the constitution itself. "From the instant that your slaveholding states become the theatre of war, civil, servile, or foreign, from that instant the war powers of Congress extend to interference with the institution of slavery in every way by which it can be interfered with, from a claim of indemnity for slaves taken or destroyed, to the cession of the state burdened with slavery to a foreign power. "Little reason have the inhabitants of Georgia and of Alabama to complain that the government of the United States has been remiss or neglectful in protecting them from Indian hostilities. The fact is directly the reverse. The people of Alabama and Georgia are now suffering the recoil of their own unlawful weapons. Georgia, sir, Georgia, by trampling upon the faith of our national treaties with the Indian tribes, and by subjecting them to her state laws, first set the example of that policy which is now in the process of consummation by this Indian war. In setting this example she bade defiance to the authority of the government of this nation. She nullified your laws; she set at naught your executive and judicial guardians of the common constitution of the land. To what extent she carried this policy, the dungeons of her prisons, and the records of the Supreme Judicial Court of the United States, can tell.