But weak as was his material frame, his mind was still enthroned.
—Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse
CONCERNING SUCH MATTERS as who was to be the next governor of Massachusetts or the next President of the United States, Adams professed to take increasingly less interest. Adverse comments about his own role in public life that appeared occasionally in print, or the “strange” letters he occasionally received, were no longer of any matter to him. They were like insects buzzing about, he told John Quincy. “Their bite in former times tingled, but I am grown almost as insensible as a Boston dray horse in September.”
“I assure you in the sincerity of a father,” he wrote to John Quincy in 1815, “the last fourteen years have been the happiest of my life.” The noticeable improvements he had brought to the farm were highly gratifying. The small, everyday pleasures, the calm, the reassuring sameness of life in and about Quincy had proven as beneficial as the pastoral ideal portrayed by the poets he loved and that he himself had so long pictured as his salvation.
But there was no indifference to the larger world. In a time of tumultuous history unfolding, as war raged at home and abroad and Napoleon's armies suffered continuing defeat, little escaped Adams's attention or a goodly measure of his opinion. Reading all they could lay hands on, he and Abigail remained informed as always, and not the least of their reasons was the part John Quincy had been delegated to play in events.
On April 1, 1814, at St. Petersburg, John Quincy received word that he had been appointed a peace envoy to negotiate an end to the War of 1812, and was to proceed at once to Ghent in Flanders (Belgium). It seemed as though history was repeating itself, with John Quincy taking up the same role his father had played at Paris in 1782.
Events were moving fast. On April 11, after further defeat on the battlefield, Napoleon abdicated his throne and went into exile on the island of Elba. The French monarchy was restored under the Comte de Provence, Louis XVIII. In America, on August 24, British troops made a successful assault on Washington, scattered the government, and set fire to the Capitol and the President's House. American warships had been driven from the sea. The Treasury was empty, the outlook grim.
In December, Federalists from the five New England States, led by Timothy Pickering, met at Hartford to denounce the “ruinous war.” There was even talk of New England seceding from the union. At Ghent the same month, the American commissioners led by John Quincy Adams signed a peace treaty with Britain, news that would not reach the United States until February, by which time Americans under General Andrew Jackson had won a decisive victory, on January 15, at the battle of New Orleans.
Then, on March 1, 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba, landed at Cannes, and with 1,500 men marched on Paris, thus beginning the fateful “100 days” that ended with Napoleon's ultimate defeat at Waterloo on June 18. Within days he was on his way to the British island of St. Helena for the remainder of his life.
The Napoleonic Wars were over, and John Quincy, after a brief sojourn in Paris, moved on to London to serve, again like his father, as minister to the Court of St. James's.
As dark as prospects had appeared during the war at home, Adams never lost confidence, even as the British advanced on Washington. He had known worse times, he said. He had seen Congress “chased like a covey of partridges” from Philadelphia, and “we had ropes about our necks then.” The very thought of New England leaving the Union, he found outrageous. As always, he took a national, not sectional, view of the country, and strongly supported President Madison.
That the likes of Napoleon came to bad ends was among the lessons of history. Concerning America's place in the world, Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush's son Richard, who had lately become Attorney General of the United States, “We must learn to know ourselves, to esteem ourselves, to respect ourselves.”
“At this time we are very anxious to hear every day, if we could, what is passing abroad,” Abigail wrote John Quincy, still having no idea where he was. “Never was there a period when curiosity was more alive, or expectation more eager, or anxiety more active.”
Letters from John Quincy written in Paris months before began arriving at last on May 6, one of the most joyful days of her life, Abigail exclaimed. And more followed through the summer, recounting the ups and downs of Napoleon and the changing moods of Paris. “I seem to be rambling with you to the Hôtel de Valois, the Hôtel du Roi,” Adams wrote in reply. Had John Quincy been to Passy yet? Or Auteuil or Versailles?
As requested, the Adamses parted with grandsons George and John, who sailed for London to join their parents and brother Charles Francis, from whom they had been separated for nearly six years. The departure of the two boys left both grandparents feeling desolate. They must keep diaries, Adams told them as once he had told their father. Without a diary, their travels would “be no better than a flight of birds through the air,” leaving no trace.
To John Quincy he kept up a steady flow of private ruminations, advice, and the suggestion that he take time for a tour of the English country gardens. He must purchase Whatley's book on modern gardening, bring his sons “and your lady, too, if she chooses,” Adams wrote, “and visit the gentlemen's country seats.”
Abigail sent John Quincy her own approving evaluation of each of the “dear boys,” and the wish that his and Louisa Catherine's joy in seeing them again would equal the pain she felt at parting with them.
• • •
“DEATH is SWEEPING his scythe all around us, cutting down our old friends and brandishing it over us,” Adams wrote a year later, in the summer of 1816. Abigail's sister Elizabeth, the last of her family, had died. Robert Treat Paine and Vice President Elbridge Gerry were gone, Gerry dying of a heart attack while riding in his carriage to the Senate. The death of Cotton Tufts, in December 1815, was another heavy blow. “Winter in this country is still winter, and carries off a few hundred of our oldest people,” observed Adams, who had turned eighty.
Abigail prepared her will, parceling out among children, grandchildren, and her niece, Louisa Smith, her silk gowns and jewelry, a white lace shawl, beds, blankets, and some $4,000. In addition, to her two sons she left two equal parcels of land she had inherited.
Six months later, in June of 1816, came word that Colonel Smith, too, was no longer among the living.
Jefferson, in his continuing correspondence with Adams, had observed that old and worn as they were they must expect that “here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will give way.” There was nothing to be done about it. Meanwhile, he wrote, “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.”
Their exchange of views remained a sustaining exercise for both men. Whatever the state of their physical “pinions and springs,” there was nothing whatever wrong with their minds, nor any decline in the respect each had for the other's talents and learning. Having run on for several pages about Cicero, Socrates, and the contradictions in Plato, Jefferson asked, “But why am I dosing you with these antediluvian topics? Because I am glad to have someone to whom they are familiar, and who will not receive them as if dropped from the moon.”
Jefferson had offered to sell his private library to the government in Washington to replace the collection of the Library of Congress destroyed by the British when they burned the Capitol. It was both a magnanimous gesture and something of a necessity, as he was hard-pressed to meet his mounting debts. After prolonged debate in Congress, a figure of $23,950 was agreed to, and in April 1815 ten wagons carrying 6,707 volumes packed in pine cases departed from Monticello. When Adams learned what Jefferson had done, he wrote, “I envy you that immortal honor.”
Jefferson immediately commenced to collect anew. He could “not live without books,” he told Adams, who understood perfectly. They remained two of the greatest book lovers of their bookish generation. Adams's library numbered 3,200 volumes. People sent him books, “overwhelm me with books from all quarters,” as he wrote to Jefferson. Yet he wished he had 100,000. He longed particularly, he said, for a work in Latin available only in Europe, titled Acta Sanctorum, in forty-seven volumes, on the lives of the saints compiled in the sixteenth century. “What would I give to possess in one immense mass, one stupendous draught, all the legends, true and false.”
Unable to sleep as long as Abigail, he would be out of bed and reading by candlelight at five in the morning, and later would read well into the night. When his eyes grew weary, she would read aloud to him.
Unlike Jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil, Adams, pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. It was part of the joy of reading for him, to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestley. “There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them...,” Adams read in Rousseau. “The government ought to be what the people make it,” he wrote in response.
At times his marginal observations nearly equaled what was printed on the page, as in Mary Wollstonecraft's French Revolution, which Adams read at least twice and with delight, since he disagreed with nearly everything she said. To her claim that government must be simple, for example, he answered, “The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels... but it would not tell the time of day.” On a blank page beside the contents, he wrote, in part:
If [the] empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown, happy indeed will it be for the world; but if all religion and all morality should be over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained? The doctrine of human equality is founded entirely in the Christian doctrine that we are all children of the same Father, all accountable to Him for our conduct to one another, all equally bound to respect each other's self love.
In all, in this one book, Adams's marginal notes and comments ran to some 12,000 words.
To the pronouncements of the French philosophes in particular, he would respond with an indignant “Nonsense” or “Fool! Fool!” But he could also scratch in an approving “Good” or “Very Good” or an emphatic “Excellent!”
“Your father's zeal for books will be one of the last desires which will quit him,” Abigail observed to John Quincy in the spring of 1816, as Adams eagerly embarked on a sixteen-volume French history.
• • •
TWO PORTRAITS of the Adamses by Gilbert Stuart, painted when Adams was President but never delivered, were added to the walls at Quincy after Adams decided to go himself to Stuart's Boston studio and bring them home. The portrait of Adams, Abigail thought quite admirable. But hers, she told John Quincy, would be recognizable only to those who had known her twenty years before. Her hair had since turned entirely white and she had so “fallen away” as to be “but a spectre” of what she once was.
At the July 4 celebration in Boston that summer of 1816, Adams looked about and realized he was nearly the last of the generation of 1776, and the only “signer” present.
He and Abigail lived for John Quincy's return, as they made plain. When during that autumn of 1816 it appeared that James Monroe was to be the next President and newspapers were reporting John Quincy the choice for Secretary of State, Adams sent off a letter to London saying he hoped it was true and that John Quincy would accept the office and come home. If not true, Adams hoped he would come home anyway. Later, with still no word from London, Abigail was more emphatic. “The voice of the nation calls you home,” she wrote. “The government calls you home—and your parents unite in the call. To this summons you must not, you cannot, refuse your assent.”
By the summer of 1817, when President Monroe, on a tour of New England, came to Quincy to dine with the Adamses on the evening of July 7, they entertained forty guests for dinner but could report nothing of their son's intentions, as there was still no word from him. It was not until July 15 that they learned from Richard Rush that the appointment had been accepted, and not until the second week of August that a letter arrived from John Quincy himself, saying he and his family were safely landed at New York.
“Yesterday was one of the most uniformly happy days of my whole long life,” Adams wrote his son. “A thousand occasions exalted delight ... a succession of warm showers all day, my threshers, my gardeners, and my farmers all behaved better than usual, and altogether kept me in a kind of trance of delight the whole day.”
“God be thanked,” Abigail wrote. “Come then all of you.”
• • •
IN THE HISTORY of the Adams family there was probably no more joyous homecoming than took place in the heat of midmorning on August 18, 1817, when John Quincy, Louisa Catherine, and their three sons came over the hill from Milton in a coach-and-four trailing a cloud of dust.
As Abigail recorded, Louisa Smith was the first to see them coming and begin shouting. Abigail hurried to the door. First out of the coach was young John, who ran to her, followed by George calling, “Oh, Grandmother, oh, Grandmother.” Ten-year-old Charles Francis, with no memory of his grandparents, approached with caution. “By this time father and mother were both out, and mutually rejoicing with us,” Abigail wrote. John Quincy had been away for eight years.
At a party given by Abigail that evening, her long drawing room was crowded with neighbors and relatives, one of whom, young Eliza Susan Quincy, described John Quincy as the focus of attention, seated at the end of the room, everyone “rather in awe of him.” At age fifty, he had already served as minister to the Netherlands and Prussia, as United States senator, Harvard professor, minister to Russia and Great Britain, and was soon to assume the second-most-important office in the government. In view of the fact that the past three Presidents in a row—Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—had earlier served as Secretary of State, it was already being said that the presidency was his destiny, too.
• • •
THE MONTHS that followed, despite another severe winter and the increasing aggravations of old age, were as happy a time for the Adamses as any in their years of retirement. While John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had departed for Washington, the three grandsons remained nearby—George at Harvard, John and Charles Francis in school in Boston. After dining at Quincy in mid-January 1818, Benjamin Waterhouse reported to John Quincy that his parents seemed in splendid health, but his father in particular. “I never saw your father in better spirits. I really believe that your return to America with all its honorable consequences has not only brightened his chain of life, but added links to it.”
It was “very cold and the snow falling fast,” Abigail wrote to Louisa Catherine, delighted by the spectacle. “It is now a foot or more deep. Winter appears to have set in, with all its beauties.” No President, she was sure, had ever had such a fine or harder-working Secretary of State as her son, Abigail continued in another letter to Louisa Catherine, written in May as her plum trees were blooming and the first peas “looking up newly arrived to daylight.” His father lived for John Quincy's letters and to write to him in return, difficult as that had become for him.
Through the summer Abigail maintained strength and pleasure in life, by all accounts. John Quincy and Louisa Catherine returned for a much-needed vacation, and several of those who came to call at about this time would remember Abigail seated on a couch sorting a basket of laundry or shelling beans as she talked. “I found a freedom in conversation [with her].... She was possessed of the history of our country and the great occurrences in it,” wrote the noted Salem clergyman William Bently. “She had a distinct view of our public men and measures and had her own opinions.”
But in October, Abigail was taken seriously ill. The diagnosis was typhoid fever, and she was told to remain perfectly still and try not to speak.
“The dear partner of my life for fifty-four years as a wife, and for many years more as a lover, now lies in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to,” Adams wrote in anguish to Jefferson on October 20. The day following, Benjamin Waterhouse sent off a letter to John Quincy advising him to be prepared for the worst. “She has recovered from a similar state once before, and she may again, but typhoid... at 74 years of age is enough to create alarm.”
Friends and neighbors took turns with Adams, son Thomas, and niece Louisa Smith at Abigail's bedside. She was dosed with quinine and Madeira by her physician, Amos Holbrook, and for a day or so she seemed to improve. “Your mother was pronounced so much better this morning that your father has resumed his book,” wrote a friend, Harriet Welsh, to John Quincy and Louisa Catherine. But in another day Abigail had taken a turn for the worse.
On Monday morning, October 26, as Adams sat with her, she spoke for the first time. She told him she was dying and that if it was the will of Heaven, she was ready. She had no wish to live except for his sake.
“He came down,” wrote Harriet Welsh, who was waiting on the first floor, “and said in his energetic manner, ‘I wish I could lie down beside her and die, too.’ ” “The whole of her life has been filled up doing good,” Adams told the others who were gathered. “I cannot bear to see her in this state.”
Returning to her room later, Adams was trembling so much that he could not stand and had to take a chair, but then seeing that Louisa Smith was in worse distress, he got up and went to her side to tell her they must be strong.
Abigail died at approximately one o'clock in the afternoon, Wednesday, October 28, 1818. She was, according to her son Thomas, “seemingly conscious until her last breath.”
She was buried on November 1. Adams insisted on walking in the procession to the meetinghouse, and except for a momentary dizziness due to the unseasonable heat of the day, he went through “all the rest,” as Thomas wrote, “with great composure and serenity.”
• • •
BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE'S letter warning John Quincy to be prepared for the worst had not reached Washington until the day before his mother's death, and it was not until the day after her funeral that he learned she was gone, “the tenderest and most affectionate of mothers,” as he wrote to his father. “How shall I offer consolation for your loss, when I feel that my own is irreparable?”
“Gracious God! Support my father in this deep and irreparable affliction!” he wrote in his diary.
My mother... was a minister of blessing to all human beings within her sphere of action.... She had no feelings but of kindness and beneficence. Yet her mind was as firm as her temper was mild and gentle. She... has been to me more than a mother. She has been a spirit from above watching over me for good, and contributing by my mere consciousness of her existence, to the comfort of my life.... Never have I known another human being, the perpetual object of whose life, was so unremittingly to do good.
“My ever dear, ever affectionate, ever dutiful and deserving son,” Adams wrote, in the first letter he could manage:
The bitterness of death is past. The grim spider so terrible to human nature has no sting left for me.
My consolations are more than I can number. The separation cannot be so long as twenty separations heretofore. The pangs and the anguish have not been so great as when you and I embarked for France in 1778.
All Quincy was in mourning. “The tidings of her illness were heard with grief in every house, and her death is felt as a common loss,” the Reverend Peter Whitney had said without exaggeration at the funeral service.
Madame Adams possessed a mind elevated in its views and capable of attainments above the common order of intellects.... But though her attainments were great, and she had lived in the highest walks of society and was fitted for the lofty departments in which she acted, her elevation had never filled her soul with pride, or led her for a moment to forget the feelings and the claims of others.
The obituary notice in Boston's Columbian Centinel emphasized her importance to her husband's career in public service and thus to the nation:
Possessing at every period of life, the unlimited confidence, as well as affection of her husband, she was admitted at all times to share largely of his thoughts. While, on the one hand, the activity of her mind, and its thorough knowledge of all branches of domestic economy, enabled her almost wholly to relieve him from the cares incident to the concerns of private life; on the other, she was a friend whom it was his delight to consult in every perplexity of public affairs; and whose counsels never failed to partake of that happy harmony which prevailed in her character; in which intuitive judgment was blended with consummate prudence; the spirit of conciliation, with the spirit of her station, and the refinement of her sex. In the storm, as well as the smooth sea of life, her virtues were ever the object of his trust and veneration.
Letters of condolence arrived for Adams, including one from Jefferson, who had himself been gravely ill. Time and silence were the only medicines, he counseled Adams. “God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.”
“While you live,” Adams answered, “I seem to have a bank at Monticello on which I can draw for a letter of friendship and entertainment when I please.
I believe in God and in his wisdom and benevolence [he continued], and I cannot conceive that such a Being could make such a species as the human merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe in a future state, I should believe in no God. This universe, this all, this totalitas [“totality”] would appear with all its swelling pomp, a boyish firework.
That he had been blessed in a partnership with one of the most exceptional women of her time, Adams never doubted. Her letters, he was sure, would be read for generations to come, and with this others strongly agreed. Years later Louisa Catherine, who had not always enjoyed a close or easy relationship with her mother-in-law, would say that it was especially in the letters of Abigail Adams that “the full benevolence of an exceptional heart and the strength of her reasoning capacity” were to be found. “We see her ever as the guiding planet around which all revolved performing their separate duties only by the impulse of her magnetic power.”
To his granddaughter Caroline, Adams would write of Abigail's “virtues of the heart.” Never “by word or look” had she discouraged him from “running all hazards” for their country's liberties. Willingly, bravely, she had shared with him “in all the dangerous consequences we had to hazard.”
For years afterward, whenever complimented about John Quincy and his role in national life, and the part he had played as father, Adams would say with emphasis, “My son had a mother!”
• • •
Two WEEKS after Abigail's death, the painter John Trumbull, as well as several of the Quincy family, insisted that Adams go with them to Boston—“carried me off by storm,” he reported to John Quincy—to view Trumbull's enormous new painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Commissioned by Congress for the rotunda at the Capitol, it was on tour through several cities and was now on display at Faneuil Hall.
In preparation for an earlier, much smaller version of the scene, Trumbull had painted studies from life of thirty-six of the signers, including Adams, whom Trumbull sketched in London. If there was anyone who ought to see the colossal new rendition, measuring twelve by eighteen feet, it was surely Adams. Also, it was hoped the excursion to town would do him good.
The arrival of Adams at Faneuil Hall was described that night in her journal by Eliza Susan Quincy, herself an artist, who was among those riding with him. “Colonel Trumbull came to the carriage door... assisted Mr. Adams to alight and offered his arm to descend the steps. But Mr. Adams pushed him aside and insisted in handing Mrs. Quincy up the stairs and into Faneuil Hall, in which many persons had assembled.” The aged Adams standing before the painting, gazing silently at “the great scene in which he had borne a conspicuous place,” was a sight long remembered.
In composing the picture, Trumbull had placed Adams at the exact center foreground, as if to leave no doubt about his importance. Hand on hip, Adams looked stout but erect, the expression on his face, one of bold confidence and determination. Beside him, facing the desk where John Hancock sat in the president's chair, were Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Jefferson, and Franklin, all dead now except Jefferson, who in the painting held the Declaration in his hands.
Ranged behind were forty-seven of the fifty-six delegates who had signed the Declaration, each quite recognizable, including Adams's favorite, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, standing at the rear with his Quaker hat on.
What Adams thought as he looked at the painting will never be known. A few years earlier, hearing that Trumbull was to undertake such a commission, Adams had lectured him on the importance of accuracy. “Truth, nature, fact, should be your sole guide,” Adams had said. “Let not our posterity be deluded with fictions under the pretense of poetical or graphical license.” Further, he had expressed concern over the projected size of the painting. “The dimensions, 18 by 12, appear vast... I have been informed that one of the greatest talents of a painter is a capacity to comprehend a large space, and to proportion all his figures in it.” During his years in Europe, Adams recalled, he had never passed through Antwerp without stopping to see the paintings of Rubens. “I cannot depend upon my memory to say that even his Descent from the Cross or his Apotheosis of the Virgin exceeded these measures.”
Clearly, Trumbull was no Rubens, and concern for accuracy had not been a major consideration. No such scene, with all the delegates present, had ever occurred at Philadelphia.
His audience in Faneuil Hall waited for Adams's response. Then, pointing to a door in the background, on the right side of the painting, he said only, “When I nominated George Washington of Virginia for Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, he took his hat and rushed out that door.”
Possibly it was Adams's old vanity that prompted the remark—to remind those gathered of how much else he had done of importance in that room in Philadelphia—or perhaps, confronted all at once with so many faces from the past, he was reminded of the all-important man whose face was not to be seen. Afterward, in a note to John Quincy, Adams remarked only on how cold it had been in the hall and that he had “caught the pip [a sore throat] as a result.”
John Quincy was vexed—“forgive me my dear father for saying it”—that Adams had not paid greater homage to the “mighty consequences” of July 4, 1776. “It was not merely the birthday of a powerful nation. It was the opening of a new era in the history of mankind.” As for the painting, which he had already seen, John Quincy thought it highly disappointing, no more than a collection of interesting portraits, “cold and unmeaning.” But then in capturing so sublime a scene, even a Raphael or a Michelangelo would have been inadequate, he was sure.
“All is now still and tranquil,” Adams wrote to Jefferson as the year ended. “There is nothing to try men's souls.... And I say, God speed the plough, and prosper stone wall.”
• • •
TO THE GREAT DELIGHT of everyone around him, Adams remained remarkably healthy and good-spirited. In the exchange of correspondence with Jefferson he continued to be by far the more productive, sending off thirteen letters to Monticello in the year 1819, for example, or more than two for every one from Jefferson.
To his immense pleasure, his Dutch friend, Francis van der Kemp, came for a visit of several days. Writing to Jefferson, Adams described Van der Kemp as “a mountain of salt of the earth.”
With Nabby and Abigail gone, Louisa Catherine filled a great need in his life, writing to him steadily and with affection, and welcoming what he wrote in return. Concerned about the trials she would face as the wife of so prominent a public man, Adams cautioned her to study stoicism. But who was he to preach stoicism, she responded warmly. “You, my dear sir, have ever possessed a nature too ardent, too full of benevolent feelings ... to sink into the cold and thankless state of stoicism. Your heart is too full of all the generous and kindly affections for you ever to acquire such a cold and selfish doctrine.”
John Quincy's achievements as Secretary of State were proving all that a proud father could hope for. When the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 added Spanish Florida to the United States, the old President in Quincy proclaimed it a blessing “beyond all calculation,” largely for the ways it might serve American naval operations.
His enjoyment of his family never diminished. He kept close watch on how George, John, and Charles Francis were progressing in their education. To help his son Thomas, who was having a difficult time supporting his wife and five children—but also for his own pleasure—Adams insisted they move in with him. When it was said he deserved to be known as the father of the American navy, Adams answered that he was father of enough as it was, with two sons, fourteen grandchildren, and five great grandchildren, all of whom required his attention and support.
He loved company, the house full. He was rarely without aches and pains and suffered spells of poor health. Some days were extremely difficult. But he could still ride horseback, at nearly eighty-five, and on “rambles” over the farm or his walks about town he sometimes covered three miles.
He never tired of the farm. He loved every wall and field, loved its order and productiveness, the very look of it. “My crops are more abundant than I expected,” he would write one September. “I have the most beautiful cornfield I ever saw. It is drawn up like an army in array, in a long line before my house.”
His appetite strong, he delighted in the plain, substantial fare of the family table. As he wrote to Louisa Catherine, “We go on ... eating fat turkeys, roast beef—and Indian pudding—and more than that, mince pies and plum pudding in abundance, besides cranberry tarts.”
In the hours he spent alone, reading, thinking, or just looking out the window by his desk, he found an inner peace, even a sense of exhilaration such as he had seldom known. Old poems, ballads, books he had read many times over, gave greater pleasure than ever. “The Psalms of David, in sublimity, beauty, pathos, and originality, or in one word poetry, are superior to all the odes, hymns, and songs in any language,” he told Jefferson. He had read Cicero's essay on growing old gracefully, De Senectute, for seventy years, to the point of nearly knowing it by heart, but never had it given such joy as on his most recent reading, he told another correspondent.
For as I like a young man in whom there is something of the old [ran a famous passage], so I like an old man in whom there is something of the young; and he who follows this maxim, in body will possibly be an old man but he will never be an old man in mind.
The simplest, most ordinary things, that in other times had seemed incidentals, could lift his heart and set his mind soaring. The philosophy that with sufficient knowledge all could be explained held no appeal. All could not be explained, Adams had come to understand. Mystery was essential. “Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good,” he wrote in the margin of one of his books, “but never assume to comprehend.”
Even the punctuation of a page, or the spelling of an individual word, could seem infinitely beautiful to him as part of what he had come to see as “this wonderful whole.
I never delighted much in contemplating commas and colons, or in spelling or measuring syllables; but now ... if I attempt to look at these little objects, I find my imagination, in spite of all my exertions, roaming in the Milky Way, among the nebulae, those mighty orbs, and stupendous orbits of suns, planets, satellites, and comets, which compose the incomprehensible universe; and if I do not sink into nothing in my own estimation, I feel an irresistible impulse to fall on my knees, in adoration of the power that moves, the wisdom that directs, and the benevolence that sanctifies this wonderful whole.
The view from his window the morning after one of the worst March storms on record filled him with ecstasy, despite the damage done to his trees. It was “the most splendid winter scene ever beheld,” Adams wrote.
A rain had fallen from some warmer region in the skies when the cold here below was intense to an extreme. Every drop was frozen wherever it fell in the trees, and clung to the limbs and sprigs as if it had been fastened by hooks of steel. The earth was never more universally covered with snow, and the rain had frozen upon a crust on the surface which shone with the brightness of burnished silver. The icicles on every sprig glowed in all the luster of diamonds. Every tree was a chandelier of cut glass. I have seen a Queen of France with eighteen millions of livres of diamonds upon her person and I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub. The whole world was glittering with precious stones.
• • •
IN LATE 1820, at age eighty-five, Adams found himself chosen as a delegate to a state convention called to revise the Massachusetts constitution that he had drafted some forty years before.
“The town of Quincy has been pleased to elect me a member of the Convention—and wonderful to relate—the election is said to be unanimous... I am sufficiently advanced in my dotage to have accepted the choice,” he reported to Louisa Catherine. “I feel not much like a maker or mender of constitutions, in my present state of imbecility.... But I presume we shall not be obliged to carry windmills by assault.” But in what was to be his last public effort, in a speech considered “very remarkable” for its energy and conviction, Adams boldly offered an amendment guaranteeing complete religious freedom in the commonwealth. As he believed that all were equal before God, so he believed that all should be free to worship God as they pleased. In particular, he wanted religious freedom for Jews, as he had written earlier to a noted New York editor, Mordecai Noah, who had sent him a discourse delivered at the consecration of a synagogue in New York.
“You have not extended your ideas of the right of private judgment and the liberty of conscience both in religion and philosophy farther than I do,” Adams wrote in appreciation.
I have had occasion to be acquainted with several gentlemen of your nation and to transact business with some of them, whom I found to be men of as liberal minds, as much as honor, probity, generosity, and good breeding as any I have known in any seat of religion or philosophy.
I wish your nation to be admitted to all the privileges of citizens in every country in the world. This country has done much, I wish it may do more, and annul every narrow idea in religion, government, and commerce.
Jefferson wrote to tell Adams he “rejoiced” at the news that Adams had “health and spirits enough” to take part in such an effort in the “advance of liberalism.” On arrival at the convention, Adams had received a standing ovation. But his amendment failed to pass. Blaming himself, he told Jefferson, “I boggled and blundered more than a young fellow just rising to speak at the bar.” But to young Josiah Quincy, who came by frequently to visit, Adams spoke with regret of the intolerance of Christians.
Josiah, a student at Harvard, was to keep Adams company over several years, spending summers as Adams's secretary, and in his diary he devoted frequent entries to “the President” and his observations on life. “Visited the President as usual,” he wrote at the end of one session. “He was quite amusing, and gave us anecdotes of his life. He was particularly funny in an account of an interview he had with the Turkish ambassador [the envoy from Tripoli]in England.” Another time Adams stressed the need for “commotion” in life, to keep it from going stagnant. “For my own part,” he exclaimed, “I should not like to live to the Millennium. It would be the most sickish life imaginable.”
One June evening, when Adams came to call on the Quincys and brought along a letter from Jefferson to read aloud, he was asked to explain how he could possibly be on such good terms with Jefferson, after all the abuse he had suffered from him. According to Josiah's diary, Adams replied as follows:
I do not believe that Mr. Jefferson ever hated me. On the contrary, I believe he always liked me: but he detested Hamilton and my whole administration. Then he wished to be President of the United States, and I stood in his way. So he did everything that he could to pull me down. But if I should quarrel with him for that, I might quarrel with every man I have had anything to do with in life. This is human nature... I forgive all my enemies and hope they may find mercy in Heaven. Mr. Jefferson and I have grown old and retired from public life. So we are upon our ancient terms of goodwill.
Indeed, Adams had become sufficiently confident in their “ancient goodwill” to broach the subject of slavery. In 1819, with Congress in debate over whether to admit Missouri into the union as a slave state, Adams had expressed the hope to Jefferson that the issue might “follow the other waves under the ship and do no harm.” Yet he worried. “I know it is high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American empire,” but a struggle between the states over slavery “might rend this mighty fabric in twain.”
The Missouri Compromise of 1820—whereby Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine (until then part of Massachusetts) as a free state, and slavery excluded in the Louisiana Territory north of latitude 36° 30'—left Adams in torment over the future. She would think him mad were he to describe “the calamities that slavery was likely to produce in the country,” he wrote to Louisa Catherine. He imagined horrible massacres of blacks killing whites, and in their turn, whites slaughtering blacks until “at last the whites exasperated to madness shall be wicked enough to exterminate the Negroes.”
All possible humanity should be shown the blacks, he told another correspondent. And while he did not know what the solution to the presence of slavery should be, he was certain it should not be allowed to expand. He was “utterly adverse” to the admission of slavery into Missouri, which was in exact opposition to Jefferson, who favored it. Slavery, he now told Jefferson, was the black cloud over the nation. He had a vision of “armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in armor.” Yet he knew not what to do.
I have been so terrified with this phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the southern gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments. What we are to see God knows, and I leave it to him and his agents in posterity. I have none of the genius of Franklin, to invent a rod to draw from the cloud its thunder and lightning.
Jefferson, who believed that slavery was a “moral and political depravity,” nonetheless refused to free his own slaves and gave no public support to emancipation. “This enterprise is for the young,” he wrote to a young Albemarle County neighbor who was freeing his slaves and urged Jefferson to “become a Hercules against slavery.”
In response to Adams's impassioned letter of foreboding, Jefferson said nothing. To others, however, he wrote privately at some length. He favored gradual emancipation and eventual colonization for the slaves. Should they ever be set free all at once, Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin, “all whites south of the Potomac and the Ohio must evacuate their states, and most fortunate those who can do it first.” But with Adams he avoided any discussion of the subject.
When, in his next letter, Adams suggested that in addition to the military academy at West Point, which had been established during Jefferson's presidency, there ought to be a naval academy, Jefferson replied at once in agreement.
Jefferson's own great preoccupation, his all-consuming interest for several years now, was the establishment of a new university for Virginia at Charlottesville. It was one of the proudest efforts of his life, and he was involved in every aspect, organizing the curriculum, choosing the site, and designing the buildings. Once construction was under way, he kept watch from his mountaintop by telescope. The full complex, when finished, would be his architectural masterpiece. The faculty, as he told Adams proudly, would be drawn from the great seats of learning in Europe.
Adams, who had no project to keep him occupied, said Jefferson's university was surely “noble employment.” He did not, however, approve of sending abroad for professors when, as he told Jefferson, there were a sufficient number of American scholars with more active, independent minds than to be found in Europe.
The two old correspondents continued to write of their declining health and persistent ailments, of old memories and the death of friends, but the letters grew fewer in number, and there was much about each of their lives that they kept to themselves.
Jefferson told Adams nothing of the new house he had built at his other plantation, Poplar Forest, or that Monticello, as visitors noted, was going to decay. He made no mention of his worsening financial straits and said not a word ever on the subject of Sally Hemings and her children. Indeed, he never referred to his slaves or the fact that his entire way of life was no less dependent on them than ever. Nor did he say anything of the dreadful turmoil within his own household—of the erratic behavior of his son-in-law, Martha's husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, or of the grandson-in-law, Charles Bankhead, who was subject to violent alcoholic rages.
But then neither did Adams write of his own increasing worry and sorrow over his son Thomas, who, having failed in the law, was drinking heavily and employed now primarily as a caretaker for his father and the farm. John Quincy's son Charles Francis, writing of his uncle Thomas, described him as “one of the most unpleasant characters in this world... a brute in manners and a bully in his family.”
The question of how two of his sons, Charles and Thomas, could have so sadly fallen by the wayside, while John Quincy so conspicuously excelled could only have weighed heavily on Adams's mind. But of this, for all that he wrote on nearly everything else, he wrote nothing. The closest he seems to have come in blaming himself was in a letter to John Quincy admonishing him that “children must not be wholly forgotten in the midst of public duties.”
• • •
VISITORS CONTINUED to call out of curiosity or genuine friendship, and Adams took pleasure in nearly all. Only occasionally would some leave him feeling low and more alone than before. Of one couple he wrote to Louisa Catherine, “They had eyes and ears to perceive the external person, but not feelings to sympathize with the internal griefs, pains, anxieties, solitudes, and inquietudes within.” But he refused to complain.
The morning of August 14, 1821, 200 West Point cadets, an entire corps, who were touring New England, marched out from Boston to parade past the Adams house, colors flying and band playing. Half the town turned out for the excitement. Adams, who stood watching from the porch, had provided breakfast for the cadets at his own expense. Tables were set up under an open tent. When they had stacked their arms and lined up before him, Adams made a brief speech, his voice faint at first but growing stronger as he went on. It was the example of the character of George Washington that they should keep before them, he said.
His remarks finished, the band played a tune called “Adams and Liberty,” while he beat time to the music. At the last, when all 200 cadets came up onto the porch one by one, Adams shook hands with each. “President Adams seemed highly gratified,” recorded Eliza Susan Quincy.
• • •
IF ADAMS'S LIFE—indeed, Adams himself—could be defined by what was left to him that he loved, there was still a great deal to the life and to the man, and he was extremely grateful. “No man has more cause for gratitude,” he assured Louisa Catherine.
He had his library room, where he slept now among his treasured books. On the table beside his reading chair were the latest novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, the sermons of Bishop Joseph Butler, along with Pascal's Provincial Letters.
He had almost continuous company and thrived on it. “In the evening I ... [went] to the President's and found the old gentleman well and lively,” reads one entry in Josiah Quincy's diary. “I scarcely ever saw him look better or converse with more spirit,” reads another. One June evening at the Quincys', having talked more than anyone, Adams declared happily, “If I was to come here once a day, I should live half a year longer,” to which the family said he must therefore come twice a day and live a year longer. The next day he was back again.
His pride in John Quincy knew no bounds. If he was writing to him less frequently, Adams explained, it was for good reason. “I know that you would answer every scratch of a pen from me, but I know the importance of your occupations and your indefatigable attentions to them, and no trifling letter from me should divert your mind.” The weeks in summer when John Quincy and Louisa Catherine returned home were invariably the summit of the year for the old man.
He wrote regularly to his grandsons on all manner of subjects, from books to the therapeutic benefits of riding horseback to the importance of maintaining one's independence through life. To Charles Francis he issued a summons to make of himself all that was possible. “Arouse your courage, be determined to be something in the world,” Adams wrote. “You have a fine capacity, my dear boy, if you will exert it. You are responsible to God and man for a fine genius, a talent which is not to be buried in the earth.”
In the spring of 1823, when John was expelled from Harvard, along with fifty others of the senior class for taking part in a student riot, Adams, in an effort to intercede in his behalf, explained to his mother that he could not find it in his own heart to reproach the boy, since he “did no more than all the rest, nor so much as many,” and urged Louisa Catherine to “receive him tenderly, and forgive him kindly.”
The affection Adams felt for Jefferson was expressed repeatedly and often with touching candor. When an old private letter of Adams's attacking Jefferson turned up in print, to Adams's extreme embarrassment, Jefferson proved that the friendship meant no less to him. “It would be strange indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “if, at our years, we were to go an age back to hunt up imaginary, or forgotten facts, to disturb the repose of affections so sweetening to the evening of our lives.”
Physically, Adams was declining rapidly. He suffered severe pains in his back. In cold weather his rheumatism was such that he could get about only with a cane. His teeth were gone. His hearing was going. Sadly, he had to admit he could mount a horse no longer. Yet he insisted, “I am not weary of life. I still enjoy it.”
• • •
IN 1824, with James Monroe due to retire from the presidency, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was nominated as a candidate to replace him, exactly as long predicted. With three others also nominated, and all, like John Quincy, avowed Republicans—William Crawford of Georgia, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee—it became a crowded contest of “increasing heat.” John Adams was a great admirer of Andrew Jackson, but the prospect of his adored son winning the highest office was thrilling and a strong reason to stay alive.
To compound the excitement of the summer of 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette returned for a triumphal tour of America, causing a sensation. Landing at New York, he proceeded northward to Boston, accompanied by his son George Washington Lafayette, and on August 29 arrived at Quincy to pay an afternoon call on Adams.
As a crowd gathered outside the Adams house, numbers of the family filled the room where the two old heroes sat reminiscing, Adams hugely enjoying the occasion. “Grandfather exerted himself more than usual, and as to conversation, appeared exactly as he ever was,” recorded Charles Francis. “I think he is rather more striking now than ever, certainly more agreeable, as his asperity of temper is worn away.”
Afterward, Adams is said to have remarked, “That was not the Lafayette I knew,” while Lafayette, saddened by the visit, reportedly remarked, “That was not the John Adams I knew.”
John Quincy, when he arrived in September for a holiday of several weeks, was shocked by his father's drastically deteriorating condition.
His sight is so dim that he can neither write nor read. He cannot walk without aid.... He bears his condition with fortitude, but is sensible to all its helplessness.... He receives some letters, and dictates answers to them. In general the most remarkable circumstance of his present state is the total prostration of his physical powers, leaving his mental faculties scarcely impaired at all.
Such was the change in his father that John Quincy decided that one last portrait must be done and persuaded Gilbert Stuart, who was himself nearly seventy and seriously ill, “to paint a picture of affection, and of curiosity for future times.”
Adams agreed to sit, but only because of his regard for Stuart. Adams had little faith in portraits of himself. “Speaking generally,” he said, “no penance is like having one's picture done.” When a French sculptor, J. B. Binon, had been commissioned a few years earlier to render a marble bust for Faneuil Hall, Adams had posed most reluctantly—“I let them do what they please with my old head,” he had told Jefferson. Stuart, however, was a famously entertaining talker, and thus another matter. “I should like to sit to Stuart from the first of January to the thirty-first of December,” Adams said, “for he lets me do just as I please, and keeps me constantly amused by his conversation.”
Wearing a best black suit, Adams posed on a red velvet settee in the parlor. As anticipated, he and Stuart had a thoroughly fine time during several sittings, and the finished portrait was one of Stuart's finest. Had it been done by an inferior hand, as Josiah Quincy observed, it might have been painful to look at. But Stuart had caught “a glimpse of the living spirit shining through the feeble and decrepit body. He saw the old man at one of those happy moments when the intelligence lights up the wasted envelope.”
• • •
EVER SINCE Abigail's death, the last days of October had become the most difficult time of the year for Adams. As his grandson George reminded Louisa Catherine, “He was married on the 27th, Grandmother died on the 28th, his birthday [was] the 30th, her funeral, the 31st.” These days, and their memories, as Adams had told George, brought overwhelming sorrow. The “encroaching melancholy” made everything else seem uninteresting and insignificant.
But among the family and friends who gathered at the Big House on October 30, 1824, to celebrate Adams's eighty-ninth birthday, it was thought that because of the forthcoming election he looked better and “conversed with more spirit” than he had in years. When, after election day, it became known that in Quincy, Braintree, and Weymouth, John Quincy had received every vote cast for the presidency, Adams declared it one of the most gratifying events of his life.
The outcome of the contest nationally, however, was not to be resolved until February. For though Andrew Jackson received more popular votes, no candidate had a majority in the electoral count. So again the decision was left to the House of Representatives, where Speaker of the House Henry Clay used his influence to make John Quincy Adams president. The deciding vote took place in Washington on February 9, 1825. Five days later the news reached Quincy, and again family and friends crowded about “the old President” to wish him congratulations.
He... was considerably affected by the fulfillment of his highest wishes [wrote Josiah Quincy]. In the course of conversation, my mother compared him to that old man who was pronounced by Solon to be the highest of mortals when he expired on hearing of his son's success at the Olympic games. The similarity of their situations visibly moved the old gentleman, and tears of joy rolled down his cheek.
Later, however, Adams told those gathered, “No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.”
From Monticello came warm congratulations. “It must excite ineffable feelings in the breast of a father to have lived to see a son to whose educ[atio]n and happiness his life has been so devoted so eminently distinguished by the voice of his country,” Jefferson wrote. Nor should Adams worry about how the country would respond to the outcome.
So deeply are the principles of order, and of obedience to law impressed on the minds of our citizens generally, that I am persuaded there will be an immediate acquiescence in the will of the majority as if Mr. Adams had been the choice of every man.
“Every line from you exhilarates my spirits and gives me a glow of pleasure, but your kind congratulations are solid comfort to my heart,” Adams wrote. “The little strength of mind and the considerable strength of body that I once possessed appear to be all gone, but while I breathe I shall be your friend.”
• • •
ON FRIDAY, March 4, 1825, inside the Hall of the House of Representatives at the Capitol in Washington, John Quincy Adams took the oath of office as the sixth President of the United States, administered by Chief Justice John Marshall; and as the year proceeded in Quincy, Massachusetts, the health and physical strength of his aged father, the second President of the United States, seemed to improve rather than decline. Benjamin Waterhouse, who had thought Adams very near death, was amazed by the change, as he wrote to the President. “But physicians do not always consider how much the powers of the mind, and what is called good spirits, can recover the lost energies of the body. I really believe that your father's revival is mainly owing to the demonstration that his son has not served an ungrateful public.”
Adams, reported Waterhouse, could still tell stories and laugh heartily, “and what is more, eats heartily, more than any other at table. We stayed until he smoked out his cigar after dinner.”
A stream of visitors continued through the seasons and among them was young Ralph Waldo Emerson, who a few years earlier had graduated from Harvard as class poet. He found Adams upstairs in his library seated in a large overstuffed armchair, dressed in a blue coat, a cotton cap covering his bald head. Recounting the interview, Emerson wrote, “He talks very distinctly for so old a man—enters bravely into long sentences which are interrupted by want of breath but carries them invariably to a conclusion without ever correcting a word.”
Speaking of the mood of the times, Adams exclaimed with vehemence, “I would to God there were more ambition in the country,” by which he meant, “ambition of that laudable kind, to excel.”
Asked when he expected to see his son the President, he said, “Never,” meaning presumably that the press of John Quincy's duties would keep him in Washington. But John Quincy did return, in the early fall of 1825, and spent several days with his father, though what conversation passed between them is unknown. Probably they both knew it was the last time they would spend with one another, and possibly they reviewed the will Adams had drawn up some years before, whereby he left to John Quincy the house, an estimated 103 acres, his French writing desk, “all my manuscript letter-books and account books, letters, journals, and manuscript books, together with the trunks in which they are contained,” as well as his library, on “the condition that he pays to my son, Thomas Boylston Adams, the value of one half of the said library.” The remainder of the estate was to be divided among his two sons, grandchildren, and Louisa Smith.
“My debts, which I hope will not be large,” Adams had stipulated, “and my funeral charges, which I hope will be very small, must be paid by my executors.”
On the day of his departure, Monday, October 13, John Quincy wrote only, “Took leave of my father.”
• • •
ANOTHER OF THE visitors who climbed the stairs to the library, a writer named Anne Royall, found Adams nearly blind, his hair “perfectly white,” but was struck by the “sunshine of his countenance,” which, when he spoke, became “extremely animated.”
As Emerson had been told, Adams was always better for having visitors from morning until night, and never was this quite so evident as an evening in the fall of 1825, when Josiah Quincy was assigned to escort his great-aunt Hannah on a visit to the old President.
Hannah Quincy Lincoln Storer was the flirtatious “Orlinda” of Adams's early diaries, to whom he had once nearly proposed. She had since buried two husbands—Dr. Bela Lincoln of Hingham and Ebenezer Storer, the treasurer of Harvard—and as Josiah noted, she and Adams were now both verging on their ninety-first year.
As his visitor entered, Adams's face lighted up. “What! Madam,” he greeted her, “shall we not go walk in Cupid's Grove together?” “Ah, sir,” she said after an embarrassed pause, “it would not be the first time we have walked there!”
Perhaps the incident is not worth recording [Josiah wrote], as there is really no way of getting upon paper the suggestiveness it had to a witness.... The flash of old sentiment was startling from its utter unexpectedness. It is the sort of thing which sets a young fellow to thinking. It is a surprise to find a great personage so simple, so perfectly natural, so thoroughly human.
Late in November, Adams submitted to one further ordeal for the sake of posterity, when an itinerant sculptor named John Henry Browere appeared at Quincy to make a life mask by a secret process of his own invention. It was known that the experience could be extremely disagreeable for the subject, as the entire head had to be covered with successive layers of thin grout and these given time to dry. When, earlier in October, Browere had gone to Monticello to do Jefferson, the mask had dried so hard it had to be chopped off with a mallet, Jefferson suffering, as he said, a “severe trial.” But John Quincy and young Charles Francis had also been done by Browere, and so Adams consented, even though Charles Francis, worried about his grandfather, warned how unpleasant, even dangerous, the experience could be.
The life mask that resulted was not the aged John Adams of the Gilbert Stuart portrait, with a “glimpse of the living spirit shining through.” It was instead the face of a glowering old man at odds with life and the world. But then the expression was doubtless greatly affected by the ordeal he had been put through. “He did not tear my face to pieces,” Adams wrote good-naturedly to Charles Francis afterward, “though I sometimes thought he would beat my brains out with his hammer.”
Then, at the year's end, a granddaughter of Jefferson's, Ellen Wayles Randolph, who had recently married a Massachusetts man, Joseph Coolidge, Jr., came to call accompanied by her husband. Adams was extremely pleased. All the high praises he had heard about her were true, he told Jefferson, aware no doubt that she was Jefferson's favorite.
“She entertained me with accounts of your sentiments of human life, which accorded so perfectly with mine that it gave me great delight. Only on one point did he differ, Adams said. She had told him that Jefferson would like to repeat his life over again. “In this I could not agree; I had rather go forward and meet whatever is to come.”
• • •
WITH 1826 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it was not long into the new year when Adams and Jefferson were being asked to attend a variety of celebrations planned to commemorate the historic event on the Fourth of July. Invitations poured into Quincy and Charlottesville from Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The two former presidents were, with eighty-eight-year-old Charles Carroll of Maryland, the last signers of the Declaration still alive. Further, as everyone knew, Jefferson was its author and Adams had been its chief advocate on the floor of Congress. One was “the pen,” the other “the voice,” of independence, and the presence of either at any Independence Day celebration, large or small, would give it significance as nothing else could.
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.
• • •
AN 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 sure. 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.