John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  With the association of the thundering cannon, which I heard, and the smoke of burning Charlestown, which I saw on that awful day, combined with this pyramid of Quincy granite and John Tyler’s nose, with a shadow outstretching that of the monumental column, I stayed at home and visited my seedling trees and heard the cannonades, rather than watch the President at dinner in Faneuil Hall swill like swine and grunt about the rights of man. 35

  Celebration at the completion of the Bunker’s Hill Monument in Charlestown in June 1843. Invited to be the principal orator, John Quincy Adams refused to attend because of the presence of President John Tyler, a Virginia slaveholder and fierce opponent of abolition. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Shortly after the Bunker’s Hill ceremonies, John Quincy left for Cincinnati, fulfilling his every lust to experience the latest scientific advances in transportation—steam-driven trains to Albany, New York, and across New York State to Buffalo, then steamboats across Lake Erie to Cleveland and down the Ohio Canal to Columbus. At every stop, cheering crowds welcomed him as a hero. The “firing of cannon, ringing of bells . . . and many thousand citizens” greeted him in Schenectady, New York; thousands more—and the governor—waited in Albany. A torchlight parade led his way through Utica, New York, climaxing with a photographer taking a daguerreotype of him with General Tom Thumb. “Multitudes of citizens” cheered in Cleveland, and in Columbus, he confessed, he had never witnessed “so much humanity.” In Dayton, two military companies awaited to escort him, along with “an elegant open barouche in which I took a seat and thus in triumphal procession we entered the city,” where “a vast multitude” awaited. He reached Cincinnati on November 8 and, to his enormous satisfaction, learned that the city had named the hill on which its new observatory would stand Mount Adams.

  His last major stop was in Pittsburgh, which gave him a “magnificent reception” before he helped lay the cornerstone for still another astronomical observatory “to promote the cause of science.” He returned to Washington in November, after traveling across Pennsylvania, with brass bands, public officials, and huge crowds cheering his visit in every community. Speaking at every stop, however, took its toll, and he contracted a debilitating cold, complete with sore throat, cough, and other symptoms.

  “My strength is prostrated beyond anything that I ever experienced before,” he moaned. It was, after all, his first “campaign.” He had refused to campaign in 1824 and 1828 when he ran for the presidency, and now that he was not even contemplating that office, he finally learned what campaigning was like—and he rather enjoyed it.

  After President Tyler declined to run for a second term, former Speaker James K. Polk of Tennessee won the Democratic nomination for President in 1844 and the presidency itself, defeating the perennially ambitious Henry Clay. As loser, Clay nonetheless shared one distinction with his winning opponent: news of the presidential election results had, for the first time in history, traveled over the wires of a new invention, the telegraph.

  During his last month in office, President Tyler asked Congress again to approve annexation of Texas, and although John Quincy had blocked two earlier attempts, the House finally approved it in February 1846. As John Quincy had predicted, war with Mexico followed Polk’s assumption of power. Only ten members of the House joined John Quincy in voting against the war.

  In November 1846, John Quincy suffered a stroke while visiting his son Charles Francis in Boston. Rendered speechless and confused, his right side paralyzed, he seemed close to death; his doctors gave Louisa little hope for her husband’s recovery. As she kept vigil in his room each day, however, he gradually recovered his speech, then his mind and memory, and by early December, he laughed off his illness, snapping at his friends that he had suffered only vertigo. But when he tried to stand and walk, he fell; he could no longer support himself.

  By Christmas, however, he was talking about returning to Congress, and on New Year’s Day, he set out for a ride in his carriage. A month later, on Sunday, February 7, sheer willpower held him upright as he walked from his son’s house to both morning and afternoon church services to take communion. Despite protests from his wife and son, he and they, and a nurse, left for Washington the next day, reaching the Adamses’ F Street home in February 1847, in time to celebrate Louisa’s seventy-second birthday. The following morning he walked slowly, but magisterially, onto the floor of the House, and as he took his seat, the members rose as one—North, South, East, and West—to cheer him. Among those celebrating his return was a tall, lanky, unkempt freshman congressman from Springfield, Illinois—Abraham Lincoln. During his short tenure in the House, Lincoln would prove one of John Quincy’s strongest supporters—not just in the cause of abolition but regarding Adams’s proposals for federal initiatives in highway and canal construction and other forms of national expansion. Echoing the words of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, Lincoln asserted that “Congress has a constitutional authority . . . to apply the power to regulate commerce . . . to make improvements.”36

  After Congress recessed in 1847, John Quincy insisted on returning to Quincy for the summer. Friends and relatives staged a gala eightieth birthday party for him on July 11, and two weeks later, they feted John Quincy and Louisa’s golden wedding anniversary. John Quincy overwhelmed Louisa by giving her a beautiful bracelet that his son Charles Francis had purchased for him.

  Congressman Abraham Lincoln won election to the House of Representatives in 1847 and served during John Quincy Adams’s last days in Congress. He is seen here in a daguerreotype probably taken in Springfield, Illinois, in 1847. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  On November 1, Louisa and Charles Francis took John Quincy back to Washington, but the trip exhausted him—left him palsied, his entire body shaking. Too weak to speak audibly or to write, he walked unsteadily; he was nearly blind. He nonetheless insisted on taking his seat at the opening of the House on December 6, and Louisa conceded, “The House is his only remedy.”37

  Although he gave up all but one of his committee obligations and rode instead of walking to the House, he appeared for every roll call every day thereafter. He cast one of only four votes in favor of a resolution to withdraw U.S. troops from Mexico. Even Lincoln voted against it. And his face, if not his body, came to life when he heard a resolution supporting a Spanish government demand that the United States pay the Amistad ’s owners $50,000 for the loss of their ship and its “cargo,” which the Spanish minister characterized as a band of assassins. Although he lacked the spring that once shot him to his feet, he nonetheless accomplished the same result and assailed the Spanish minister for having wanted the Amistad captives “tried and executed for liberating themselves.”

  “There is not even the shadow of a pretense for the Spanish demand,” John Quincy growled after the laughter subsided. “The demand, if successful, would be a perfect robbery committed on the people of the United States. Neither these slave dealers, nor the Spanish government on their behalf, has any claim to this money whatever.”38 The House agreed and rejected the proposal. He then presented two petitions for peace with Mexico, and the House rejected them both.

  By mid-December, he had grown too weak to continue writing in the diary he had kept for sixty-eight years, and, indeed, he had to refuse a treasured invitation to speak at the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument on December 10.

  On New Year’s Day, he wrote to his only surviving son, Charles Francis, and, with an unsteady hand, wished him “a stout heart and a clear conscience, and never despair.”39 On February 21, 1848, President Polk sent the Senate a treaty of peace with Mexico for ratification. In the House, supporters of the war proposed sending the thanks of Congress to the American generals for their victory. When the echoes from the roar of “ayes” had faded, a single, shrill voice startled the Congress. In a last, desperate effort to punish those engaged in what he called that “most unrighteous war,”40 John Quincy Adams sounded a firm, unmistakable “No!” It was his last word to the Congress he cherished.
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  When the clerk read the next resolution and called his name—his was third on the alphabetical roll—he tried to stand, his right hand gripping his desk as he rose. Then he slumped to his left—fortunately, into the arms of a fellow congressman who had been watching him.

  The death of John Quincy Adams in the Capitol he loved, with, presumably, his former secretary of state Henry Clay holding his right hand. (FROM A NATHANIEL CURRIER LITHOGRAPH, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  “Mr. Adams is dying,” cried a congressman nearby. “Mr. Adams is dying.” The words passed from member to member. Other members found a couch that they brought onto the House floor and helped their stricken colleague stretch out. Someone thought to ask for a formal adjournment. Both the Senate and Supreme Court followed suit when they learned of John Quincy’s collapse. A group of congressmen carried the sofa and its occupant into the rotunda to give John Quincy more air, but they eventually moved it into the Speaker’s office, where they barred every one but physicians, family, and close friends. John Quincy revived enough to thank those around him and to ask for Henry Clay, who arrived weeping. He clasped his old President’s hand, unable to say a word before he finally left, inconsolable.

  “This is the end of earth, but I am composed,” John Quincy whispered, then lapsed into a coma. Louisa arrived with a friend and looked down at her husband, but his eyes showed no sign of consciousness. Eighty-year-old John Quincy lay in a coma for the next two days, and at 7:20 p.m., on February 23, 1848, he died in the Capitol he adored.

  The next day, House members appointed a committee with one member from each state to escort John Quincy home to Massachusetts for burial. In the Senate, one of his bitter political foes, Thomas Hart Benton, stood to proclaim, “Whenever his presence could give aid and countenance to what was useful and honorable to man, there he was. . . . Where could death have found him but at the post of duty?”41

  The nation mourned as it had not since the deaths of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. John Quincy lay in state in a committee room in Congress for two days after his death; thousands filed by silently, often not knowing why exactly, but somehow realizing they had lost a champion of their rights—a representative of no single constituency, state, or region but of all Americans and of the whole nation. He was an aristocrat of an earlier generation, raised in an age of deference, who spoke a rich language that ordinary people could seldom fathom, but in the end, they sensed that he spoke for their greater good and to protect their rights and freedoms.

  A single cannon blast awakened Washington on Saturday morning, February 25; another boom shook the city a minute later and every minute until noon. Again, the multitude reappeared, filling the streets like a great river flowing to the Capitol. At 11:50, the bell on Capitol Hill began to toll, and the President of the United States led the justices of the Supreme Court, high-ranking members of the military, the diplomatic corps, and members of the Senate into the House chamber. John Quincy lay in a silver-framed coffin on an elevated platform in front of the rostrum, his eloquence still resounding in the silent chamber:

  My cause is the cause of my country and of human liberty . . . the fulfillment of prophesies that the day shall come when slavery and war shall be banished from the face of the earth.42

  With the President seated at the Speaker’s right, the vice president at his left, and the portraits of Washington and Lafayette looking down on them all, the chaplain of the House prayed and set off what Charles Francis Adams called “as great a pageant as was ever conducted in the United States.” Choirs sang to the gods, and orators lifted their voices to men, repeating the appeal for John Quincy’s precious “Union.” When the assembly had intoned its final hymn, pallbearers carried the former President out of the Capitol to a silent multitude that stretched to the edge of the city. The great casket emerged from the Capitol, surrounded by an official committee of escort and followed by Charles Francis Adams and his wife, then John Quincy’s closest friends from the legislature. In the procession that followed, the Speaker of the House led members of that body, the Senate, then President Polk, justices of the Supreme Court, the diplomatic corps, and an interminable line of military officials, state officials, college students, firemen, and members of craftsmen’s organizations and literary societies. . . . It was endless—a collective outpouring of love and veneration the nation had rarely seen.

  John Quincy lay in rest at the Congressional Cemetery for a week before the congressional committee of escort—a member from each state—came to take him aboard a train to Boston. Thousands lined the tracks northward to bow their heads as the train passed slowly, one car draped in black bearing John Quincy’s coffin. The train stopped at various stations and crossings to allow citizens to climb aboard and say their good-byes as they filed past him. Churches sang his praises; newspapers expounded his glory and cited and published his oratory and poetry. Thousands awaited his arrival in Boston, filling the streets and all but blocking passage for his coffin to Faneuil Hall for a massive funeral ceremony before members of the state legislature and other prominent citizens. With the end of the eulogy and last prayer, the congressional committee delivered the body of their colleague, John Quincy Adams, to Mayor Josiah Quincy, John Quincy’s cousin and former president of Harvard, for transport to the family vault in Quincy. A lifetime of friends and neighbors had gathered with his relatives and family to place John Quincy beside his father. As they laid John Quincy to rest, a small troop fired rifles in a last salute from nearby Penn’s Hill, where John Quincy and his mother, Abigail, had watched the Battle of Bunker’s Hill and the beginning of the Revolution that spawned a new nation.

  Day of my father’s birth, I hail thee yet.

  What though his body moulders in the grave,

  Yet shall not Death th’ immortal soul enslave;

  The sun is not extinct—his orb has set.

  And Where on earth’s wide ball shall man be met,

  While time shall run, but from thy spirit brave

  Shall learn to grasp the boom his Maker gave,

  And spurn the terror of a tyrant’s threat?

  Who but shall learn that freedom is the prize

  Man still is bound to rescue or maintain;

  That nature’s God commands the slave to rise,

  And on the oppressor’s head to break his chain.

  Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round,

  Till not a slave shall on this earth be found.

  —JOHN QUINCY ADAMS,

  THE WHITE HOUSE, 1827.43

  A little more than twelve years after John Quincy died—on December 24, 1860—South Carolina’s legislature proclaimed without dissent that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and the other States, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.” Early in 1861, ten other states followed suit, and in April 1861, the civil war that John Quincy Adams had predicted was under way, eventually costing the lives of more than 275,000 Americans.

  Louisa Adams died four years after John Quincy, on May 15, 1852, in Washington, DC.

  She and her husband now lie together next to John and Abigail Adams in a granite crypt in the church in Quincy, Massachusetts, where Charles Francis had them all transferred after escorting his mother’s body from the capital. Although no subsequent members of the Adams family ever followed John or John Quincy Adams to the presidency, no American family ever surpassed the Adamses in accession to national prominence in so many fields. Beginning with his son Charles Francis Adams, who served as American ambassador to Britain and twice ran unsuccessfully for vice president, John Quincy Adams spawned an august line of American scholars, teachers, historians, authors, legislators, jurists, diplomats, lawyers, doctors, business leaders, and other professionals who upheld—and uphold—the principle of their distinguished ancestor:

  You must have one great purpose of existence . . . to make your talents and your knowledge most beneficial to your country and most useful to mankind.

  —JOH
N QUINCY ADAMS, “TO MY CHILDREN.”44

  Notes

  Explanatory note: John Quincy Adams kept his diary from November 1779 to December 1847, accumulating a total of 14,000 pages. The early diaries, from November 1779 to December 1788, were published in book form as Diary of John Quincy Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981). The rest of the diary—fifty-one volumes in all—is only available digitally, over the Internet, by logging on to “The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection,” on the website of the Massachusetts Historical Society (www.masshist.org/jqadiaries). In this book, notes referring to extracts from the first two published volumes of the diary will show the appropriate volume and page numbers. When extracted from the Internet, the notes will simply show the appropriate date and the initials MHS (Massachusetts Historical Society).

  Abbreviations:

  AA Abigail Adams

  AP Adams Papers

  AFC Adams Family Correspondence

  JA John Adams

  JM James Monroe

  JQA John Quincy Adams

  LCA Louisa Catherine Adams

  MHS Massachusetts Historical Society

  EPIGRAPH

  1 Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), 7:164 (hereafter Memoirs). Mistakenly published in his Memoirs as written on October 30, 1826. In his old age, JQA had slipped the undated poem at random between pages of his diary bearing the 1826 date, and his son, Charles Francis, in compiling his father’s Memoirs for publication, assumed that was the date on which his father had written it.