John Adams - SA (94 page)

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.