Directing his anger at the speaker of the House, James Knox Polk, whom Adams addressed as “the slave-holder sitting in the chair,” he asked: Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian, emancipator of slaves, and abolisher of slavery? Is your southern and southwestern frontier not sufficiently extensive?… Are you not large and unwieldy enough already? Have you not Indians enough to expel from the land of their fathers’ sepulchres, and to exterminate?
