US Constitution … John Quincy Adams

The February 1, 1863 Liberator, on the upper right beside the masthead, has a title, “The US Constitution is A Covenant with Death, and An Agreement with Hell”.   Then a long quote from John Quincy Adams. “What order of man under the most absolute of monarchies, or the most aristocratic of republics, was ever invested with such an odious and unjusty privilege as that of the separate and exclusive representation of less than half a million owners of slaves, In the Hall of this House, in the chair of the Senate, and in the Presidential mansion?  This investment of power in the owners of one species of property concentrated in the highest authorities of the nation, and dissembled through thirteen of the twenty-six States of the Union, constitututes a privileged order of men in the community, more adverse to the rights of all, and more pernicious to the interests of the whole, than any order of nobility ever known.  To call government thus constituted a Democracy is to insult the understanding of mankind … it is double tainted with the infection  of riches and of slavery.  There is no name in the languages of national jurisprudence that can define it  — no model in the records of ancient history, or in the political theories of Aristotle, with which it can be likened.  It was introduced into the Constitution of the United States by an equivocation —  Little did the members of the Convention from the Free States imagine or foresee what a sacrifice to the Moloch as hidden under the mask of concession.”  John Quincy Adams