Today’s #stampoftheday, which is a 1938 2-cent stamp picturing John Adams, the second president of the United States, offers yet another opportunity to use the past to better understand our present predicament. The stamp was one of series of 29 stamps issued in 1938 honoring all the presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, a list that includes eight people who owned slaves while they were president and four more who had owned slaves before they became president.

Adams, who was not one of the slave-holding presidents, was a seminal figure in his time who played a key role in shaping several of the Constitutional provisions that are a key part of today’s debates. Notably, in 1779, ten years before the U.S. Constitution was adopted, he drafted the Massachusetts constitution, which protections for the press, religious belief, and juries, all key elements that informed the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which he strongly supported. Such protections were needed, he believed, because (as he said in 1772): “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”

Adams also was the only one of the nation’s first five presidents who did not own slaves while he was president (though he did hire slaves owned by others to work in the White House). And the sixth president, who was the second non-slaveholding president, was his son John Quincy Adams.

In total, of the fifteen men who were president before the Civil War, eight owned slaves while they were president (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor) and another two had owned slaves earlier their lives (van Buren and Harrison). Moreover, two post-Civil War presidents (Andrew Johnson and and Ulysses S. Grant also had owned slaves before they were president).

However, in the late 1700s, Adams was not an abolitionist because he believed that slavery would not survive and grow as an institution particularly if the United States banned importation of slaves, a policy he supported for many years and that was finally adopted in 1807, after Adams was president. However, in his later years, when he saw that slavery was growing, not contracting, he became increasingly concerned about the threats it posed to the nation.

In 1819, for example, he wrote: “Negro Slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude.” A year later he wrote: “I shudder when I think of the calamities which slavery is likely to produce in this country. You would think me mad if I were to describe my anticipations…If the gangrene is not stopped I can see nothing but insurrection of the blacks against the whites.” And a year after that he observed: “slavery in this Country I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century.”

He was right, of course, and that cloud never really left.

Stay safe, be well, fight for justice and strive for peace.