Earlier efforts to purchase Texas from Mexico, in which John Quincy Adams, when he was president, had been a leader, were part of the expansionist impulse without overt reference to the issue of slavery. But the significance of acquiring Texas—“annexing” it, now—became quite different after the Mexican government abolished slavery in the 1829.

The Americans, many of them from Southern states, who had moved into Texas, often taking their slaves with them, and who had fought for the independence of Texas, wanted to bring Texas into the United States. Remembering the massacre at the Alamo in March of 1836, they had defeated the Mexican forces in the Battle of San Jacinto late in April—shortly before the first gag resolution had been passed, in May of 1836. From that date forward there were efforts to annex independent Texas as a slave state, or possibly as a collection of several slave states, and another outpouring of petitions from the antislavery forces opposing this annexation.

The annexation of Texas as a slave state would have a decided effect on the balance of power in the United States government, adding two senators from one slave state (or more!) to the evenly balanced Senate (Arkansas’s two, newly present in this Congress, had been balanced by Michigan’s) and, because of the three-fifths rule, more representatives than the voting population justified to the House and to the picking of presidents. So the contest over the annexation of Texas was now seen to be—by the antislavery forces, almost exclusively—a struggle for power over the future of American freedom.

Certainly it was seen that way by John Quincy Adams. Beginning in 1836, Adams had had correspondence about Texas and slavery with Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, the founder of the early abolitionist paper on which young William Lloyd Garrison had got his start in the journalism of abolition. The saintly Lundy—a man Adams much admired—was in a quiet way a leading opponent of slavery in the 1820s, before abolition exploded onto public consciousness in the 1830s, and Lundy focused on Texas. He had twice journeyed to Texas to explore the possibility of producing plantation crops without slavery. He was forestalled by the Texas Revolution, but became convinced by his experience that the “domineering tyrants of the South” would use the annexation of Texas to expand their power.

John Quincy Adams read a tract by Lundy on the subject of Texas at about the time the gag rule controversy started. “People of the North!” wrote Lundy. “Will you permit it?” The “abominable outrage” of the annexing of Texas? “The establishment of slavery in a land of freedom?” The placing of the necks of the American people under the feet of those domineering tyrants? Adams was persuaded by Lundy’s polemics and made his first speech against the annexing of Texas, using Lundy’s arguments, on May 25, 1836—the day before the Pinckney gag passed the House.