John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  The bill Congress finally passed on August 10 authorized the creation of an institute dedicated to “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” echoing the language of the Smithson bequest. The funds would not be used for any sort of university or college. An independent board of regents would chart its future course. Over time, the Smithsonian would grow into a diverse body of institutions that would both diffuse and increase knowledge, though another century would have to pass before entities like the National Institutes of Health would wholly fulfill Adams’ vision of public research institutions. Adams understood that for America to take its place in the front rank of nations it needed to expand not only its territory and its industry but its knowledge. In this, as in many things, he was far ahead of his time.

  THROUGH GOOD TIMES AND BAD, AND THROUGH NUMBERLESS infirmities, Adams had continued to keep up his diary. He understood that he had achieved something extraordinary not only in his own time, but in the annals of human endeavor. In late 1846, he wrote, “There has perhaps not been another individual of the human race, whose daily existence from early childhood to fourscore years has been noted down with his own hand so minutely as mine.” If only the Creator had granted him genius, he observed, “my diary would have been, next to the Holy Scriptures, the most precious and valuable book ever written by human hands.” It’s a stupefying judgment, qualified by Adams’ humility, for he was quite sure that the Creator had not granted him such a gift.

  For Adams the diary had become coterminous with life itself. He lived, and he recorded his life. As his life began to peter out, so, too, did his diary. First, he found that he could no longer write. On September 30, 1845, he began an entry in a suddenly gnarled script with the words, “From this time the total disability to write with my own hand compels me to.” There followed a series of blots, and then, in a new hand, “I took the Pills prescribed by Dr. Woodward last evening.” He was now dictating his entries to one of his grandchildren. On October 20, he started again with his own hand and then once again surrendered, this time, he noted, to his granddaughter, Louisa Catherine. To dictate a diary entry is, in a way, to cease to write a diary at all, at least in the sense that in a journal the author speaks to himself only. The subsequent entries are shorter and more public, and thus less vital and self-revealing, than the earlier ones.

  Adams continued to record the events of his life—puttering around the garden in Quincy; reading the ancients; attending, without fail, the debates in Congress. On July 13, 1846, Adams wrote that he had paid a visit to his old swimming spot behind the White House. Three young men were gathered around the rock where, in years past, he would strip down and leave his clothes. One shouted, “There is John Quincy Adams!” Adams moved to another spot, disrobed, and jumped in for a “bathe” of five or ten minutes. He returned two days later. That appears to have been the last time Adams ever swam.

  Adams returned to Quincy in mid-August. Of the many invitations he continued to receive, he responded to only one. He agreed to attend, and to serve as honorary chair for, a Faneuil Hall meeting on the issue that had convulsed Boston: the return of fugitive slaves. An audience of five thousand roared as he briefly took the rostrum. He compared the question to one that had brought him to that same place almost four decades earlier—the British attack on the Chesapeake. His lonely position then had cost him the support of New England. Now he was a revered elder, beyond all reproach. “It is a question,” he said in his faltering voice, “whether your and my native Commonwealth is to maintain its independence or not.” Adams would never again appear before a public audience.

  That late summer and fall, Adams sat in his study and read, wrote a very few letters (mostly about business affairs), occasionally received old friends, and talked to Louisa and the grandchildren. He wrote very few entries in his diary, though his hand remained clear, if thicker than before. In mid-November he moved to Charles Francis’ house on Mt. Vernon Street in Boston, intending to leave from there for Washington. On the twentieth he rose, as usual, before dawn and bathed with a horsehair strap and mitten. He went out to take a walk with his old friend Francis Parkman, a Unitarian minister and father of the great historian of the same name. As Adams prepared to leave, his knees buckled, and he sank to the floor. He was carried to bed. Thenceforward he was attended night and day by a nurse, unable even to reach the bathroom on his own. He had had a stroke, which left him helpless though not paralyzed. He could neither write nor even dictate his journal.

  Adams gradually recovered. On January 1, 1847, he rode in a carriage and then began walking. He felt, however, that he remained in the vale of the dead. On January 19, he came into his son’s room and handed him a copy of the will he had just executed. In his own diary, Charles Francis recorded his father’s words to him. “He said that his diary was closed,” Charles Francis wrote. “He would never write any more of it. He would place it in my hands, to do with it what I thought proper, at the same time distinctly stating that it had never been written for extended publication, and it was not his wish that such publication should be made.”

  Charles Francis may have heard the wish buried beneath the studied ambivalence, and as his father’s literary executor he edited a monumental twelve-volume edition of the diary. Perhaps he understood that his father did not expect his wish to be honored. After all, John Quincy Adams believed that he had produced a monument to human labor, if not to human genius. He had chiseled a mighty apologia pro vita sua in which he had gotten the best of every debate and had acted out of the most noble of motives. He had exalted the very few men he admired and laid low his innumerable rivals. And yet he may have meant what he said. Adams’ diary was a work of supreme introspection and even intimacy, and he was not a man to expose his inmost nature to the world. He had left the world his deeds and his public words. Perhaps he wished his deepest feelings to be buried with himself. If so, we should be grateful that Charles Francis defied his father’s express preference.

  The old man’s infirmity produced a reversal in relations between husband and wife. Louisa had always been the family valetudinary; now she had to be strong for her feeble husband. She wrote to her daughter-in-law Mary to remark how very strange it was that “I should be the one to crawl about, useless to any purpose,” while her husband, who “has been an active agent for mankind,” should be stilled. Louisa still had the occasional fainting spell, but she made light of it. She and Charles’ wife, Abby, never left Adams out of their sight for fear that he might attempt something rash and then fall. “We are more alarmed when he is well, than when he does poorly,” as she wrote to Mary. She wrote that her husband was devastated by the recognition that he would remain dependent on others for the remainder of his life; only Abby could beguile him from his despondent moods. In her journal, which she briefly resumed, Louisa wrote a fervent prayer for her husband’s “restoration.” Yet she also wished that he would reconcile himself to his end, as she herself long had. She implored God to “strengthen him to obedience; fortify his spirit with faith; and graciously encourage him to struggle against the worldly passions, which war against his soul.”

  But those worldly passions warred still in the old man. Adams was determined to return to Washington and resume his duties as congressman. On February 8 he and Charles Francis boarded a train, arriving in the capital on the twelfth. Adams insisted that he attend Congress the following day. When he appeared, debate in the hall instantly stopped. Andrew Johnson, who had been occupying the former president’s seat, graciously restored it to him. Adams thanked him, and the Speaker, and took his place. By March 14, Adams had gained enough strength to pick up a pen in order to record the events of the time from his stroke. He titled his entry, “Posthumous Memoir.” From the time he fell to the floor, Adams wrote in a shaky but quite legible hand, “I date my decease, and consider myself for every useful purpose to myself or to my fellow-creatures, dead; and hence I call this and what I may write hereafter a posthumous memoir.”

  The diary, like the man,
died by degrees and more slowly than anyone had expected. Adams continued to write, to attend Congress, to tie up the loose strings of his life. His letters and diary entries are much taken up with the question of finance. In a letter to Charles Francis he ticked off the responsibilities he had been bearing over the years as executor of the estate of his parents; his friend, Nicholas Ward Boylston; his brother-in-law, Thomas B. Johnson; Louisa’s brother-in-law, Walter Hellen; and his son John. He was, he added without complaint, legal guardian to two of his granddaughters and two of Boylston’s grandchildren.

  The number of people who depended on Adams for support was remarkable. He had never had remotely lucrative employment, never made a killing, never received a legacy. He had been brought close to ruin first by his brother Charles and then by his son John. He had been compelled to bail out his parents at great personal cost to himself and had received nothing from them save the house and land that he had purchased at considerable expense. Yet through long years of “economy” and prudent investment, he would leave behind him an estate capable of supporting all those dependents. The will he had drawn up in January contained a tally of all his property, which, in addition to stocks and other liquid assets, included eleven houses and commercial properties in Boston, four houses and eight lots in Washington, the family house in Quincy, the estate at Mount Wollaston, and a total of 851 acres of wood lot, quarry lot, saltmarsh, and farmland. This most dutiful of sons had been a truly wise steward.

  Adams returned to Quincy in early June. When Charles Francis saw this pale, drawn old man, he reflected: “I see nothing left in him of the vigor which was once his character.” It was deeply unsettling for the son to see a man he had loved and feared, and always relied on, so irretrievably reduced. “I feel sad when I look at him,” he wrote on his father’s eightieth birthday. For all that, the old man still clung tightly to life. “He has,” his son observed, “a large remnant of the physical and mental strength which yet preserves him from absolute helplessness.” Adams still took a daily walk, read, and answered letters. He responded to a correspondent writing a history of the Mexican war with a long disquisition on a favorite subject: the right of title. The historian, Adams wrote, must stand outside his own nation and his own religion in order to examine such claims honestly. Did Columbus have the right to claim the land of the Caribe Indians for Spain? Or France or Spain to claim Texas?

  Adams still thrilled to the news of astronomical discoveries. He had been delighted at disputes over credit for the discovery of the new planet known as Neptune. He lamented that he would not have time enough to study the new worlds being disclosed by rapidly improving optic technology. In October, he roused himself from his armchair to pay a last visit to the Harvard Observatory along with the board of overseers. He was still the representative from the Twelfth District of Massachusetts, and he had no intention of failing in this obligation of service. On November 1 he left for Washington. “My last great journey,” he wrote.

  Within days of arriving, Adams was receiving visitors, paying a visit to the office of the National Intelligencer, and going to the Naval Observatory with Louisa and one of his granddaughters. He was delighted to gaze upon Mars, Saturn, and Neptune. Adams even attended the opening of the new hotel founded by Joseph Willard, the descendant of which remains one of Washington’s great hotels. At the opening of Congress on December 6, Adams was asked to administer the oath of office to the new Speaker, his Massachusetts colleague Robert Winthrop. Later that month he presented several petitions and moved a resolution requiring the secretary of state to disclose diplomatic correspondence involving the war with Mexico. Adams continued to regard the war as a national disgrace. He wrote a long letter to Albert Gallatin, now a month shy of his eighty-seventh birthday, complaining that President Polk had been able to stampede the Congress into a declaration of war by the simple expedient of claiming that Mexico had initiated hostilities.

  On New Year’s Day 1848, all of Washington paid a visit to the Adams home—senators and representatives, Supreme Court justices, preening generals fresh from battles in the Mexican-American War that Adams had done everything in his declining powers to prevent. The entire family was exhausted. Adams retired to his study to write a letter to Charles Francis. “My Dear Son,” he said, “On this commencement of a new year, my thoughts intensely turn to you, to the partner of your life, to your children, and to the Giver of all good, in thanksgiving for all the blessings which you have been and still are to me . . . especially that you may be sustained in your incorruptible integrity through all the trials that may be reserved for you upon earth.” He was preparing his son to make a journey through the same thorny path he had so long traveled.

  The striking reversal of energies between Adams and Louisa continued. Now that her husband no longer required her constant attention, Louisa began visiting friends and even giving Saturday evening teas. She wrote long, gossipy “journalizing” letters to daughter-in-law Abby, as she once had to her father-in-law. She described the balls and parties attended by “the young ladies” of the household—granddaughter Louisa, grandniece Sarah, an otherwise unidentified “Miss Agnell.” She made fun of “the mighty Daniel” and Mrs. Webster after they paid a visit. And she playfully recorded a moment when Adams had moaned that he was going to die, and she had told him that in that case he should quit the Congress and return to Quincy. Instantly, she noted, his spirits quickened. This was the sparkling Louisa of another time. She also, astonishingly, asked Abby how she could raise money to buy the freedom of Julia, her maidservant. Though the Johnsons of Maryland had long owned slaves, no Adams household in memory had done so. It is very hard to imagine that John Quincy Adams would have permitted Louisa to employ a slave had he still possessed his full powers.

  Adams continued to record the speeches made and resolutions offered in Congress. The drama still absorbed him, even as he had become a silent spectator. On January 4, he wrote—or rather, granddaughter Louisa Catherine wrote—an account of the doings of the House. Broadhead of Pennsylvania offered a resolution; someone else rose to a point of order, “Giddings of Ohio”—and then, nothing. Adams must have fallen asleep, or taken ill, or waved his granddaughter away. The endless torrent of Adams’ diary comes to rest on the one colleague he loved—Giddings of Ohio. (Six weeks later he inscribed a four-line poem he must have intended for a young woman.)

  Adams continued to be seen around Washington. On February 17, he attended a reception for his old friend Joseph Seaton, now the city’s mayor. On Saturday the nineteenth, he went to see the book collection of Nicholas Vattemare, a French philanthropist (and world-renowned ventriloquist) who advocated a system of library exchange Adams planned to endorse in Congress. That evening he and Louisa held an open house at F Street, as they had been doing off and on for over forty years. On Sunday Adams attended church. Later that day he dashed off yet another “autograph,” this one for Miss Caroline Edwards of Springfield, Massachusetts: “In days of yore, the poet’s pen, / From wing of bird was plundered, / Perhaps of goose, but now and then, / From Jove’s own eagle sundered.” Adams’ gallant conceit was that since pens were now made of metal, in order to honor her name he would wrest such material from the earth itself.

  On the twenty-first Adams reached Congress at around noon. He had a sheaf of papers before him, perhaps on his Vattemare library proposal. The business at hand was a resolution to extend the thanks of Congress to the heroes of the Mexican war and to authorize the president to strike gold medals for eight particularly praiseworthy generals. Adams had continued to oppose all forms of endorsement of the war. The roll was called, and Adams cried “No” in “an emphatic manner and an unusually loud tone,” as one reporter later noted. At about one fifteen, the Speaker prepared to put the question to a third and final vote. Henry B. Stanton of the Boston Emancipator and Republican, sitting fifteen or twenty feet away, saw Adams grow flushed, apparently with excitement, and indistinctly utter several sentences. The old man then went deathly pale. �
��His right hand moved nervously upon his desk,” Stanton noted, “as if he were trying to grasp something.” Adams’ lips moved, as if he were trying to address the Speaker, but no sound emerged. “Then the action of his hand upon the desk became more convulsive, and he appeared to be stretching it out to reach the corner of his desk.”

  With men standing and milling about, no one save the reporter noticed the old man’s agony. Then, still clutching the desk to hold himself upright, Adams began to keel over to the left. A shout went up: “Mr. Adams is dying!” Several congressmen rushed over to catch him. Representative Joseph Grinnell of Massachusetts doused Adams’ head with cold water, but the old man did not respond. Members crowded around him. Adams was placed on a sofa and carried, first, to an open space in front of the clerk’s table and then out into the Rotunda. No one knew what to do. A doctor suggested that he be moved to the front door for a reviving blast of fresh air, but, the air proving too cold, Speaker Winthrop proposed that Adams be moved into his private chamber. There he lay on the sofa, behind closed doors, attended by doctors who could do nothing for him. A messenger was dispatched to F Street to fetch Mrs. Adams. With the House adjourned, the members stood around the hall as people do in the aftermath of a disaster, uncertain whether to go or stay, repeating every detail to one another and to anyone else who asked.

  Adams lingered throughout the day, immobile but not yet insensate. The Intelligencer’s reporter, who appears to have wangled his way into the Speaker’s chamber, reported that Adams was heard to murmur, “This is the end of earth. I am composed.” Others heard him to say, “I am content,” and because this reflected a deeper mood of Christian resignation, his last words were recorded as such. Another reporter wrote that Adams later responded no to a question as to whether he was better, and then, his mind perhaps wandering, said, “My son, my son.” These were not at all fitting as last words, and thus did not survive into later accounts.