ABSTRACT
The outburst of sectional feeling which had accompanied the Missouri crisis had introduced the antislavery issue into American politics. P. Jackson spoke in the phraseology of the "common man," but he gained politically from the common man's political advancement, rather than perceptibly contributed to it. The program of the Workingmen's party in 1830 opposed monopolies, imprisonment for debt, capital punishment, the militia system, legislation on religion, and unequal taxes. It favored public education, as well as reforms in the legal and political systems. Political opportunism, perhaps, but a thousand times more effective than the Channing program of regenerating individual souls. John Quincy Adams and his aides undertook to show them that their stake in freedom was threatened. Into the breach stepped Adams, quarreling with Congress and the administration in terms of his perennial, freedom of speech, but also in terms of the government plans.
