The position of Mr. Adams, who had been elected as an independent candidate, was unique. He owed his official place to no political party, and was, therefore, free from party shackles in regulating his course. He took up the fight for the black man's freedom as one who was himself absolutely free. Most wonderfully did he conduct that fight. There was nothing in the eloquence of Demosthenes in Athens, of Cicero in Rome, of Mirabeau in France, of Pitt or Gladstone in England, that surpassed the force and grandeur of the philippics of Adams against American slavery. Alone, for the greater part of his service in Congress, he stood in the midst of his malignant assailants like a rock in a stormy sea. Old man that he was, plainly showing the in-roads of physical weakness, he was in that body of distinguished and able men more than a match for any or all of his antagonists. He was always "the old man eloquent." Says one of our leading historical writers: "As a parliamentary debater he had few, if any, superiors. In knowledge and dexterity there was no one in the House that could be compared with him. He was literally a walking cyclopedia. He was terrible in invective, matchless at repartee, and insensible to fear. A single-handed fight against all the slaveholders in the House was something upon which he was always ready to enter." Speaking of his effectiveness in congressional encounters another Congressman writes: "He is, I believe, the most extraordinary man living. I have with my own eyes seen the slaveholders literally quake and tremble through every nerve and joint, when he arraigned before them their political and moral sins. His power of speech has exceeded any conception I have heretofore had of the force of words or logic." At last his enemies in Congress decided that they would endure his attacks no longer. They took counsel together and agreed upon a plan of operations looking to his expulsion from that body. As one of his biographers, also a distinguished Congressman, expressed it: "It was the preconcerted and deliberate purpose of the slave-masters to make an example of the ringleader of political Abolitionism. They meant to humiliate and crush him, and this they did not doubt their power to do." Mr. Adams submitted a petition, without giving it his personal endorsement, asking for a dissolution of the Union. That furnished the pretext his enemies wanted. They accused him of treason in countenancing an assault upon the Union, although they were at the time engaged in laying the foundation of a movement looking to its ultimate overthrow. The outcome of this undertaking was one of the most thrilling scenes ever witnesssd in the American Congress; or, for that matter, in any other deliberative assembly.