John Quincy Adams, GPA Healy

It was Quincy Adams view that slavery made Southerners, who had a sense of masterdom that Northerners did not feel, look down on their fellow-Americans, thus underminig the Union at its very heart. He noted: 'It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice.' To him, if the Union could be preserved only at the price of retaining slavery, it were better it should end, especially since in the break-up slavery itself would perish:
If slavery be the destined sword in the hands of the destroying angel which is to sever the ties of this union, the same sword will cut asunder the bonds of slavery itself. A dissolution of the Union for the cause of slavery would be followed by a servile war in the slave-holding states, combined with a war between the two severed portions of the Union ... its result must be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent and, calamitous and devastating as this course of events must be, so Glorious would be the final issue that, as God should judge me, I dare not say it is not to be desired.