John Adams

by David McCullough

  But the time was past when either Adams or Jefferson could leave home. Adams was ninety, Jefferson would be eighty-three in April, and each grew steadily more feeble. After calling on Adams that spring, Benjamin Waterhouse wrote to John Quincy, “To the eyes of a physician your father appeared to me much nearer to the bottom of the hill.”

  Still, the old mind prevailed, the brave old heart hung on. As once he had been determined to drive a declaration of independence through Congress, or to cross the Pyrenees in winter, so Adams was determined now to live to see one last Fourth of July.

  In March, knowing he had little time left, Jefferson drew his last will. Suffering from bouts of diarrhea and a chronic disorder of the urinary tract, caused apparently by an enlargement of the prostate gland, he depended for relief on large doses of laudanum. Besides, he was beset by troubles at his university—disappointing enrollment, unruly students—and by now suffered such personal financial distress that, in desperation, he had agreed to a proposal that the Virginia legislature create a special lottery to save him from ruin.

  But then Jefferson, too, was resolved to hang on until the Fourth.

  Jefferson's last letter to Adams, dated Monticello, March 25, 1826, was written at the desk in his office, or “cabinet,” where a recently acquired plaster copy of the Adams bust by Binon, a gift of a friend, looked on from a near shelf. He was writing to say that his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, was on his way to New England, and that if the young man did not see Adams, it would be as though he had “seen nothing.”

  Like other young people [Jefferson wrote] he wished to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has heard and learned of the heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.

  Thus, it was the future generation and the Revolution that occupied Jefferson's thoughts at the last. The world their grandchildren knew could give no adequate idea of the times he and Adams had known. “Theirs are the halcyon calms succeeding the storm which our argosy had so stoutly weathered,” Jefferson reminded his old friend in Massachusetts.

  Adams, in the letter that would close their long correspondence, wrote on April 17, 1826, to remark on how tall young Randolph was, and how greatly he enjoyed his visit. Also, characteristically Adams was thinking of his son John Quincy, and the rough treatment he was receiving from an uncivil Congress. “Our American chivalry is the worst in all the world. It has no laws, no bounds, no definitions; it seems to be a caprice.”

  Several days later the young Reverend George Whitney, son of the Reverend Peter Whitney, who had preached at Abigail's funeral, called on Adams and came away doubtful that he could last much longer.

  • • •

  ON JUNE 24 at Monticello, after considerable labor, Jefferson completed a letter to the mayor of Washington declining an invitation to the Fourth of July celebration at Washington. It was his farewell public offering and one of his most eloquent, a tribute to the “worthies” of 1776 and the jubilee that was to take place in their honor. Within days it was reprinted all over the country.

  May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.... All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are the grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return to this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

  As he had often before—and as was considered perfectly acceptable—Jefferson had done some borrowing for effect. In this case it was imagery from a famous speech of the seventeenth century by one of Cromwell's soldiers, Richard Rumbold, who, from the scaffold as he was about to be executed, declared, “I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.”

  Adams attempted to write nothing so ambitious, and probably, given his condition, it would have proved impossible for him. “The old man fails fast,” the Reverend George Whitney recorded after another visit on June 27.

  But when on Friday, June 30, Whitney and a small delegation of town leaders made a formal call on Adams, he received them in his upstairs library seated in his favorite armchair. They had come, they told the old patriot, to ask for a toast that they might read aloud at Quincy's celebration on the Fourth.

  “I will give you,” Adams said, “Independence forever!” Asked if he would like to add something more, he replied, “Not a word.”

  The day following, July 1, Adams was so weak he could barely speak. The family physician, Amos Holbrook, the ever faithful Louisa Smith, and one or another of the family remained at his bedside around the clock.

  When a townsman and frequent visitor named John Marston called at the house on the afternoon of July 3, Adams was able to utter only a few words. “When I parted from him, he pressed my hand, and said something which was inaudible,” Marston wrote, “but his countenance expressed all that I could desire.”

  Early on the morning of Tuesday, July 4, as the first cannon of the day commenced firing in the distance, the Reverend George Whitney arrived at the house to find “the old gentleman was drawing to his end. Dr. Holbrook was there and declared to us that he could not live more than through the day.” Adams lay in bed with his eyes closed, breathing with great difficulty. Thomas sent off an urgent letter to John Quincy to say their father was “sinking rapidly.”

  As efforts were made to give Adams more comfort, by changing his position, he awakened. Told that it was the Fourth, he answered clearly, “It is a great day. It is a good day.”

  • • •

  AT MONTICELLO, Thomas Jefferson had been unconscious since the night of July 2, his daughter Martha, his physician Robley Dunglison, and others keeping watch. At about seven o'clock the evening of July 3, Jefferson awakened and uttered a declaration, “This is the Fourth,” or, “This is the Fourth of July.” Told that it would be soon, he slept again. Two hours later, at about nine, he was roused to be given a dose of laudanum, which he refused, saying, “No, doctor, nothing more.”

  Sometime near four in the morning Jefferson spoke his last words, calling in the servants “with a strong clear voice,” according to the account of his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, but which servants he called or what he said to them are unknown.

  Jefferson died at approximately one o'clock in the afternoon on July 4, as bells in Charlottesville could be faintly heard ringing in celebration in the valley below.

  • • •

  AT QUINCY the roar of cannon grew louder as the hours passed, and in midafternoon a thunderstorm struck—“The artillery of Heaven,” as would be said—to be followed by a gentle rain.

  Adams lay peacefully, his mind clear, by all signs. Then late in the afternoon, according to several who were present in the room, he stirred and whispered clearly enough to be understood, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

  Somewhat later, struggling for breath, he whispered to his granddaughter Susanna, “Help me, child! Help me!” then lapsed into a final silence.

  At about six-twenty his heart stopped. John Adams was dead.

  As those present would remember ever after, there was a final clap of thunder that shook the house; the rain stopped and the last sun of the day broke through dark, low hanging clouds—“bursting forth... with uncommon splendor at the moment of his exit... with a sky beautiful and grand beyond description,” John Marston would write to John Quincy.

  By nightfall the whole town knew.

  • • •

  A
N ESTIMATED 4,000 people crowded silently about the First Congregational Church on July 7. A suggestion that the funeral of John Adams be held at public expense at the State House in Boston had been rejected by the family, who wished no appearance of “forcing” public tribute and asked that the service be kept as simple as possible, as Adams had wanted. But throngs came from Boston and surrounding towns. Cannon boomed from Mount Wollaston, bells rang, and the procession that carried the casket from the Adams house to the church included the governor, the president of Harvard, members of the state legislature, and Congressman Daniel Webster. Pastor Peter Whitney officiated, taking his text from 1 Chronicles: “He died in good old age, full of days... and honor.” With the service ended, the body of John Adams was laid to rest beside that of his wife, in the graveyard across the road from the church.

  The funeral could not have been “conducted in a more solemn or affecting manner,” Josiah Quincy wrote to President Adams, who still did not know of his father's death.

  The news of Jefferson's death on July 4 had only reached Washington from Charlottesville on July 6. Not until Sunday, July 9, after receiving several urgent messages from home, did John Quincy start north by coach, accompanied by young John, and it was later that day, near Baltimore, that he learned of his father's death.

  That John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died on the same day, and that it was, of all days, the Fourth of July, could not be seen as a mere coincidence: it was a “visible and palpable” manifestation of “Divine favor,” wrote John Quincy in his diary that night, expressing what was felt and would be said again and again everywhere the news spread.

  Arriving at Quincy on July 13, the President went directly to his father's house, where suddenly the gravity of his loss hit him for the first time.

  Everything about the house is the same [he wrote]. I was not fully sensible of the change till I entered his bedchamber.... That moment was inexpressibly painful, and struck me as if it had been an arrow to my heart. My father and mother have departed. The charm which has always made this house to me an abode of enchantment is dissolved; and yet my attachment to it, and to the whole region around, is stronger than I ever felt it before.

  In the weeks and months that followed, eulogies to Adams and Jefferson were delivered in all parts of the country, and largely in the spirit that their departure should not be seen as a mournful event. They had lived to see “the expanded greatness and consolidated strength of a pure republic.” They had died “amid the hosannas and grateful benedictions of a numerous, happy, and joyful people,” and on the nation's fiftieth birthday, which, said Daniel Webster in a speech in Boston, was “proof from on high that our country, and its benefactors, are objects of His care.” Webster's eulogy, delivered at Faneuil Hall on August 2, lasted two hours.

  Never a rich man, always worried about making ends meet, John Adams in his long life had accumulated comparatively little in the way of material wealth. Still, as he had hoped, he died considerably more than just solvent. The household possessions, put on auction in September, and largely bought by John Quincy, brought $28,000. Several parcels of land and Adams's pew at the meetinghouse—these also purchased by John Quincy—added another $31,000. All told, once the estate was settled, John Adams's net worth at death was approximately $100,000.

  John Quincy would insist on keeping the house, and thus it was to remain in the family for another century.

  Jefferson, by sad contrast, had died with debts exceeding $100,000, more than the value of Monticello, its land, and all his possessions, including his slaves. He apparently went to his grave believing the state lottery established in his behalf would resolve his financial crisis and provide for his family, but the lottery proved unsuccessful.

  By his will Jefferson had freed just five of his slaves, all of whom were members of the Hemings family, but Sally Hemings was not one of them. She was given “her time,” unofficial freedom, by his daughter Martha Randolph after his death.

  In January 1827 on the front lawn of Monticello, 130 of Jefferson's slaves were sold at auction, along with furniture and farm equipment. Finally, in 1831, after years of standing idle, Monticello, too, was sold for a fraction of what it had cost.

  Unlike Jefferson, Adams had not composed his own epitaph. Jefferson, characteristically, had both designed the stone obelisk that was to mark his grave at Monticello and specified what was to be inscribed upon it, conspicuously making no mention of the fact that he had been governor of Virginia, minister to France, Secretary of State, Vice President of the United States, or President of the United States. It was his creative work that he wished most to be remembered for:

  Here Was Buried THOMAS JEFFERSON

  Author of the Declaration of American Independence,

  Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,

  And Father of the University of Virginia

  Adams had, however, composed an inscription to be carved into the sarcophagus lid of Henry Adams, the first Adams to arrive in Massachusetts, in 1638.

  This stone and several others [it read] have been placed in this yard by a great, great, grandson from a veneration of the piety, humility, simplicity, prudence, frugality, industry and perseverance of his ancestors in hopes of recommending an affirmation of their virtues to their posterity.

  Adams had chosen to say nothing of any of his own attainments, but rather to place himself as part of a continuum, and to evoke those qualities of character that he had been raised on and that he had strived for so long to uphold.

  The last of the ringing eulogies to Adams and Jefferson was not delivered until October of 1826, when Attorney General William Wirt addressed Congress in Washington, speaking longer even than Webster had. Recounting Adams's career, he cited Adams's defense of the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, his break with his old friend Jonathan Sewall, the crucial role he had played at Philadelphia in 1776 and Jefferson's line “he moved his hearers from their seats.” Describing the friendly correspondence between the two old patriots in their last years, Wirt said that “it reads a lesson of wisdom on the bitterness of party spirit, by which the wise and the good will not fail to profit.”

  But the accomplished orators who celebrated the two “idols of the hour” had all drawn on the historic record, or what could be gathered from secondhand accounts. They had not known Adams or Jefferson, or their “heroic times,” from firsthand experience. Those who had were all but vanished.

  It was among the children of his children that Adams and his words to the wise would live longest in memory. “The Lord deliver us from all family pride,” he had written to John Quincy's son John, for example. “No pride, John, no pride.”

  “You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little,” he had told Caroline, in response to her quandary over the riddles of life. “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know.... Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough... So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather.”

  Adams had, however, arrived at certain bedrock conclusions before the end came. He believed, with all his heart, as he had written to Jefferson, that no effort in favor of virtue was lost.

  He felt he had lived in the greatest of times, that the eighteenth century, as he also told Jefferson, was for all its errors and vices “the most honorable” to human nature. “Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused; arts, sciences useful to man, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any period.”

  His faith in God and the hereafter remained unshaken. His fundamental creed, he had reduced to a single sentence: “He who loves the Workman and his work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of Him.”

  His confidence in the future of the country he had served so long and dutifully was, in the final years of his life, greater than ever.

  Human nature had not changed, however, for all the improvements. Nor would it, he was su
re. Nor did he love life any the less for its pain and terrible uncertainties. He remained as he had been, clear-eyed about the paradoxes of life and in his own nature. Once, in a letter to his old friend Francis van der Kemp, he had written, “Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”

  It could have been his epitaph.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  The Adams Papers, from which much of this book has been drawn, may be rightly described as a national treasure. There is no comparable written record of a prominent American family. Housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, the full collection of letters, diaries, and family papers of all kinds, ranges from the year 1639 to 1889 and in volume alone is surpassing. On microfilm it takes up 608 reels, or more than five miles of microfilm. The letters of John and Abigail Adams number in the thousands, and because they both wrote with such consistent candor and in such vivid detail, it is possible to know them—to go beneath the surface of their lives—to an extent not possible with other protagonists of the time. Not Washington, not Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton, not even Franklin for all that he wrote, was so forthcoming on paper as was John Adams over a lifetime of writing about himself and his world. When his private correspondence and diaries are combined with the letters penned by Abigail, the value of the written record is compounded by geometric proportions. Their letters to each other number more than a thousand, and only about half have ever been published. But then the letters of Adams to Jefferson and Benjamin Rush number in the hundreds, as do those by Abigail to her sisters. And beyond all that is the remarkable body of correspondence between the Adamses and their offspring.