by James Traub
Louisa arrived and was, according to a report, “quite prostrated” as she gazed on her husband’s waxen features. Henry Clay, Adams’ rival and colleague of long decades, came to the Speaker’s chambers. He stood silently by Adams’ side, held his hand, and wept. The former president was now comatose. He remained alive all that day and the next.
On the twenty-second, Charles Francis, still in Boston, went to his office, saw a telegram lying on his desk, hesitantly opened it, and learned that his father had been stricken and was not expected to last the day. Immediately he returned home, informed his wife, and boarded the next train. “He has been the great landmark of my life,” he wrote in his diary. As he raced south to his father’s bedside, Charles, as if in a nightmare, kept missing boats and trains. He was only in Philadelphia on the morning of the twenty-fourth. As he hurried through a hotel lobby, he saw a man reading a newspaper with a black border. He did not dare to ask the man what the paper said. He reached the train station, bought a pack of newspapers, but refused to open them until he had seated himself. Only then did he learn that at seven fifteen the night before, his father had breathed his last. “The glory of the family is departed,” wrote the despondent son, “and I a solitary and unworthy scion remain overwhelmed with a sense of my responsibilities.”
CHAPTER 39
Obsequies
AT NOON ON FEBRUARY 24, 1848, HOUSE SPEAKER ROBERT Winthrop reconvened the chamber to formally announce the death of John Quincy Adams. Charles Hudson, a Massachusetts representative, delivered a brief summation of Adams’ career. Isaac Holmes of South Carolina, home of the bitterest hatred of Adams, had asked to speak as well. Gently pulling a veil across the long years of censure and obloquy, Holmes recalled for his colleagues, “How often have we crowded into that aisle, and clustered around that now vacant desk, to listen to the counsels of wisdom as they fell from the lips of that venerable sage.” Samuel Vinton of Ohio said, without exaggeration, “No man has heretofore died, when a member of this body, who will occupy so large a space in his country’s history.” The House appointed a Committee of Arrangements to prepare for the funeral. Possibly the least well known of the thirty members was a freshman congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. This was the only thread that personally connected these two men.
Adams’ coffin lay in state in the Capitol’s Common Room. The deceased’s hands were crossed over his breast, producing an impression of repose few had seen in life. For two days the people of Washington, and many who had arrived from Baltimore and points more distant, filed by. The endless stream was stopped when Charles Francis arrived on the morning of the twenty-fifth. The room was cleared so that he could stand alone with his father. With the stoicism of an Adams, he composed himself before exiting.
The funeral was held on the twenty-sixth. Cannons began to fire at six A.M. The chief public buildings of the city, and many private ones, were draped in black. The Capitol had been thrown open to the public, and thousands jammed the lobbies and galleries. They were not, however, allowed to enter the House, the space most sacred to Adams. There the statues of Washington and Lafayette, which flanked the Speaker’s chair, had been draped in black, as was the figure of History, which surmounted the front entrance of the hall. Adams’ own desk was draped in mourning. The chamber was filled with the dignitaries of a nation. It was observed that some members of the diplomatic corps wore black, while others arrived in full regalia. Though a serving president, William Henry Harrison, had been buried seven years earlier, no former president had ever died in Washington, and the protocol remained unclear. Charles Francis and his sister-in-law Mary sat in front. Louisa, who had been sustained by her husband through all the griefs of her life, could not find the strength to attend without him.
At ten minutes before noon, Speaker Winthrop called the House to order, and the bells of the Capitol began to ring. A choir in the ladies’ gallery sang a dirge. The House chaplain, the Reverend R. R. Gurley, delivered a very unmemorable oration. He did feel it necessary to say of Adams’ idiosyncratic faith that “while differing on some points from common opinion, he cherished enlarged views of Christian communion.” The pallbearers then gathered around the casket. They included John Calhoun and Joseph Ingersoll, whom Adams loathed, and one person he admired, Mayor Seaton, publisher of the National Intelligencer. Adams’ remains were then carried in procession to the congressional cemetery. His lead-lined casket was borne by a funeral carriage drawn by six white horses, each led by a groom. The casket was draped in black velvet and surmounted with an eagle with spread wings, which was itself covered in crepe. A silver breastplate bore an inscription written by Daniel Webster at the behest of the Massachusetts delegation:
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
BORN
An inhabitant of Massachusetts
July 11 1767
DIED
A citizen of the United States, in the
Capitol, at Washington, February 23, 1848,
Having served his country for half a century,
And enjoyed its highest honors.
The procession through the north gate of the Capitol was a long, solemn, and extraordinary affair. First came the military companies, then a military band, then the chaplains of both chambers and the physicians who had attended Adams in his last hours. Then came the pallbearers and the funeral carriage. They were followed by Adams’ family and friends, members and officers of both houses of Congress, President Polk and his cabinet, the justices of the Supreme Court, the diplomatic corps, senior military officials, representatives from state legislatures and from the city of Washington and organizations Adams had supported (including Columbia College, later Georgetown University), various literary societies, and the Columbian Typographical Society (an organization of printers). Citizens lined the streets. The procession moved southeast along Pennsylvania Avenue—away from the White House—until it reached E Street, where it turned right until it reached the congressional cemetery on the banks of the Anacostia River. There Adams’ remains would rest until he was removed to his final resting place, in Quincy.
A little over a week was required to make arrangements. Congress had appointed one member from every state and territory to accompany the casket. As the funeral train sped northward, small-town and country people gathered at the tracks to pay their respects with bowed heads. All business came to a halt wherever the train stopped. The entire route seemed to be draped in mourning. A ferry bearing Adams’ remains reached New York on March 8. Artillery fired eighty-one times for the years of the deceased’s life. The bells in Trinity Church commenced to chime as the procession began from City Hall. A crowd of two hundred thousand men and women, remarkably quiet, watched as a hearse drawn by eight black-draped horses, led by “mulatoo grooms clad in the Turkish costume,” according to a local paper, proceeded up Broadway to Grand Street and then back down the Bowery to City Hall Park. The diarist Philip Hone, who was there, called it “the greatest body of men and women ever assembled in this city.”
Adams’ remains reached Boston on Saturday, March 11. A steady downpour precluded public events. Adams lay in state in Faneuil Hall, whose galleries were filled with inscriptions recalling the stages of the great man’s career; at one end of the hall stood the flags of all the nations where Adams had served as a diplomat. After several speeches, Adams’ remains were placed on a special train whose new locomotive had been christened the John Quincy Adams. Local escorting committees then joined the congressional detachment on the short train ride to Quincy. Adams’ casket was carried from the train depot to his home and from there taken in procession to the First Parish Church, a mile or so away.
Quincy’s Unitarian church traced its lineage to 1636, when it was founded by Congregationalists. John Adams had endowed a fund to replace the church where he and his family had worshiped, and in 1828, two years after his death, the Stone Temple, a Greek Revival structure whose granite had come from the Adams quarry, took the place of the old church on Hancock Street. Though conve
ntional in its pillared facade, the interior was an almost circular space topped by a shallow dome, far more elegant than the austerely functional structure it had replaced. Adams’ coffin was carried down the aisle and placed in front of the pulpit under a black panel whose white letters proclaimed Adams’ already immortal last words: “This is the end of earth.” The congressmen and Boston dignitaries were joined in the pews by the townsfolk who had known Adams as friend and neighbor.
The services began at three and were attended by Adams’ family, including Louisa. The eulogy was delivered by Adams’ friend and minister, the Reverend William Lunt. His theme, taken from Revelations, was, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” Lunt pointed out the window toward the two “simple and modest” homes barely a mile away where Adams and his father had been born and raised. “What miracles of beneficent social and political change have been wrought,” he said, since father and son had left Mount Wollaston to board a ship for France seventy years earlier. “Where, in history, can you find so glorious a history assigned to a single life?” Adams had been steadfast in his faith and his principles; the reward had come not to him but to his nation.
Adams’ old friends and neighbors then bore his coffin to the family vault in the Stone Temple churchyard. Adams’ casket was buried alongside the remains of his beloved sister Nabby and of his much-mourned sons, George and John. He had had a sepulcher roughly hewn from the rock below the Stone Temple and had interred his parents there. But he would remain in the churchyard with his sister and his children until his wife died.
IT WAS THE END OF EARTH. BUT IN AN ODD AND REMARKABLE WAY, over the next several months Adams lived more vividly in the American imagination than he ever had before. Adams had been undergoing a collective revaluation at least since his widely reported trip to Ohio five years earlier, when he had “met the sober second thought of the people.” No such reappraisal had been necessary for any of Adams’ predecessors save perhaps his father, who had lived so long after his presidency that his alleged monarchism had eventually lost its sting. The manner of John Quincy Adams’ own death, and his stoical and Christian last words, confirmed the sober second thoughts. He had died as he had lived—in service to the public. His virtues were those of the founders. A reporter for the New York Tribune wrote that “he never obtruded his learning or eminence upon anyone, but might have passed in the crowds for the threadbare clergyman of some secluded valley, or the ill-paid teacher of some village school.”
Adams was eulogized by several of the nation’s leading Whigs, including New York governor William Seward and Harvard president Edward Everett (though not Daniel Webster). Virtually every orator cited his last words, or alleged last words; virtually every one of them noted the circumstances of his death. Joseph Henry Allen, the minister of Adams’ church in Washington, said, “How rare it is, that everyone’s spontaneous feeling declares, that just so and no otherwise, to the smallest circumstance, was it fitting that the good man should be called away.” Adams had not had to endure the decay and humiliation of a wasting disease. He had been “called away.” One could not but feel the presence of the hand of divine Providence, in death as in life. As William Hague, the minister of a Baptist church in Boston, said of Adams’ tenure in Congress, “It was God who placed him there to guide the whirlwind and direct the storm.”
Many speakers noted Adams’ astounding endurance, his unshakeable and almost inhuman commitment to the tasks he set for himself. Edward Everett recalled the all-night session at the end of the twenty-third Congress, when Adams, alone, had remained in his seat, awake and alert. When Everett had asked the old warrior how he had sustained himself, he had “held up a dry crust of bread.” Reverend Allen recalled that at church Adams had “maintained an exact, almost military, precision, even to the smallest details of conduct,” always arriving in his pew before the beginning of the service.
Men spoke of Adams’ almost uncanny memory and mental gifts, his capacity for labor, his religious faith, his all-too-well-hidden kindness and warmth. Above all, they spoke of his “inflexible adherence to principle,” as Edwin Hubbell Chapin, a well-known Boston preacher and poet, put it. This inflexibility, this purity and simplicity of conviction, was the mark of something archaic in Adams, and something truly great. Edward Everett, who had known Adams since he had taken his rhetoric and oratory class as a Harvard undergraduate, described him as the last of the New England Puritans. The word, he said, “carries a reproach,” but by Adams’ own time the Puritans had softened their harsh intolerance yet retained their “patriarchal simplicity.” Adams was the man who could have passed for a village schoolmaster.
For the eulogists, for the newspaper editorialists, and for countless Americans, Adams was the last link to the elemental virtues of the New England Puritans and the incorruptible world of the founders. He was “as a mountain-promontory stretching out towards us from the far past,” as the Reverend Chapin put it. In his Harvard commencement address six decades earlier, Adams had worried that he and his peers could do little more than sustain the work of those great souls who had come before them. In the national imagination, Adams had now merged with that founding generation.
Some orators insisted that Adams had been a great president. William Seward, who had revered Adams since the days of Anti-Masonry, claimed that Adams had presided over the “consolidation” of the young republic. He had governed free from favoritism or patronage—“though his magnanimity was not appreciated.” Philip Hone offered a more balanced judgment in his diary:
Thus has ‘a great man fallen in Israel’—in many respects the most wonderful man of the age; certainly the greatest in the United States—perfect in knowledge, but deficient in practical results. As a statesman, he was pure and incorruptible, but too irascible to lead men’s judgment. They admired him, and all voices were hushed when he rose to speak, because they were sure of being instructed by the words he was about to utter; but he made no converts to his opinion, and when President his desire to avoid party influence lost him all the favour of all the parties.
The praise heaped on Adams constituted a melancholy tribute to the “far past.” But men who embraced the American future rather than its past did not necessarily share that feeling. In an article titled “The People & John Quincy Adams,” a writer in the New Orleans Crescent took issue with the premise that Adams’ low standing with the public for so many years had been evidence of his penchant for truth. Adams, he wrote, “was not a man of the People” and had never enlisted in “the hot struggles for the rights of men, as opposed to wealth and conservatism. . . . Is it wonderful, then, that he never was a popular man?” The former president, the author wrote, “was ‘a gentleman of the old school’, no doubt; but the old school, with all its polish and grace, had its sources too near monarchy and nobility to be entirely free from their influences.” So John Quincy Adams appeared to the twenty-nine-year-old Walt Whitman, whom recent scholarship has identified as the author of the anonymous column.
The most remarkable of all the orations, and probably the longest, came from Theodore Parker, a radical theologian and Transcendentalist, an abolitionist, a linguist, and a scholar. Parker was the minister at Boston’s largest and most prestigious Congregationalist church. On March 5, before Adams’ remains had even reached New England, he delivered not a formal eulogy but a “discourse occasioned by” Adams’ death. He spoke at the Melodeon, a lecture hall, rather than a church. The civic setting and the self-appointed nature of the speech permitted Parker a degree of candor that otherwise might have seemed impertinent. Adams himself probably would have thought his speech impertinent.
“Shall we tell lies about him because he is dead?,” Parker asked his audience. He would not. The deceased’s vote sustaining Jefferson’s 1807 embargo “has never been forgotten or forgiven.” Parker noted that as secretary of state and president he had remained mute on slavery. “He was what is called a good hater,” Parker rightly noted, and “used his wit t
yrannously.” He was a poor poet. His greatest intellectual faculty was memory, and he showed little foresight.
In what, then, did John Quincy Adams’ greatness lie? In this, Parker said: that throughout all his words and acts ran a “golden thread”—“an intense love of freedom for all men.” If once he had been too willing to accept the monstrous evil of slavery, unlike other men “he grew more liberal as he grew old.” The truly glorious moments of his life were the late ones. Parker now launched into a panegyric on Adams’ summation in the Amistad trial and on his long, lonely campaign against the gag rule:
I know of few things in modern times so grand as that old man, standing there in the House of Representatives, the compeer of Washington, a man who had borne himself proudly in kings’ courts, early doing service in high places, where honor may be won; a man who had filled the highest office in any nation’s gift; a President’s son, himself a President, standing there the champion of the neediest of the oppressed.
Parker, like Adams a moralist, a Christian, and a primeval Yankee, was able to peer into his subject’s soul as other speakers could not, or in any case did not. “He had his reward,” Parker said. He was not thinking of the afterlife but rather of the elemental force that drove Adams and drives all puritans and prophets and reformers of the human soul.