CONGRESS TOOK PARTICULAR NOTICE OF ADAMS’S death, much as it did during his life, though on this occasion in full reverence. When the House convened the following day, the Speaker made the official announcement to a full chamber and crowded gallery. Thereupon the senior surviving member of the Massachusetts delegation declared that a national treasure had been struck down, a man whose public service spanned the history of the country. He then gave a condensed biographical sketch that concluded with a series of resolutions stipulating actions the House should take. But before they could be considered, five more congressmen spoke briefly. Their number included Isaac Holmes of South Carolina, an inveterate opponent during Adams’s life. Now, however, Holmes extolled history and memory: “When a great man falls, the nation mourns; when a patriot is removed, people weep.” After these statements the House unanimously approved the resolutions detailing the steps it should take to commemorate the deceased. The Senate engaged in an identical process.1
The body lay in state in a room in the Capitol. Thousands of mourners passed by the casket. The arrival of Charles Francis from Boston on the twenty-forth interrupted the public viewing. For a short while the sole surviving son remained alone at the bier. Afterwards the long line began once again to move.
On Saturday, February 26, the funeral took place in the House. Just before noon the Speaker called for order. The bell on Capitol Hill began to toll. Led by President Polk, dignitaries filed into the chamber. After him came the justices of the Supreme Court, senior military officers, the diplomatic corps, and the senators. The nation, however briefly, seemed one again. Then Charles Francis along with other family members entered and occupied seats reserved for them. A bereaved Louisa Adams, then seventy-three years old, felt herself unable to attend. Later she cried to her diary: “Thy fiat has gone forth O Lord my God: and I am left a helpless Widow to mourn his loss which nothing on the dreary earth can supply.” She would live four more years, dying in Washington at seventy-seven in 1852.2
The coffin, adorned with a spread eagle, was brought in and placed on a catafalque directly in front of the speaker. It carried an inscribed plate:
BORN
An Inhabitant of Massachusetts
July 11, 1767
DIED
A Citizen of the United States,
in the Capitol, at Washington,
February 23, 1848,
HAVING SERVED HIS COUNTRY FOR
HALF A CENTURY, AND ENJOYED
ITS HIGHEST HONORS.
At the behest of the Massachusetts solons, Senator Daniel Webster had written it. The inscription would have pleased Adams, albeit not so much the hand that composed it.
The House chaplain opened the service with prayer. A choir in the ladies’ gallery sang a dirge. For his biblical text he chose a passage from the Old Testament book of Job (chapter 11, verse 17 and the first part of 18) that surely befitted Adams: “And thine age shall be clearer than the noonday; thou shalt shine forth, thou shalt be as the morning.” Then the chaplain preached a commonplace sermon praising Adams for his virtue and service and thanking God for giving the country such an estimable man. A final hymn ensued.
With the completion of the service, the solemn cortege moved from the chamber to the east front of the Capitol, where a long procession formed to escort the body to the Congressional Cemetery, almost two miles away. Military companies, a band, chaplains of the House and Senate, other clergymen, family members, luminaries from the president onward to judges, diplomats, military officers, and government officials followed by an array of others made up the company. The funeral carriage located near the front of the line was flanked by twelve honorary pallbearers, John C. Calhoun among them. Upon reaching the cemetery, the casket was placed in a vault where it would remain until its transport to Quincy.
President Polk remarked on the impressive ceremony. He described the funeral procession as the longest he had ever seen. “It was a splendid pageant,” he recorded.3
News of Adams’s stroke and death spread rapidly through the nation. Not long before, the telegraph had put the nation’s capital in almost instantaneous contact with places as far north as Portland, Maine, as far west as the Ohio River valley, and as far south as Richmond, Virginia. Newspapers promptly pushed the baleful tidings into even farther corners. Throughout the country Americans could share practically simultaneously in events taking place in Washington in a fashion heretofore impossible. Everywhere the press reported on the public funeral at the Capitol.4
One week after the temporary internment at the Congressional Cemetery, the casket was loaded onto a funeral train for the trip to Massachusetts. So many times in the preceding decades as a senator, a cabinet officer, a president, Representative Adams had made the journey north to home in Quincy. This time, in addition to the family, the House-appointed Committee of Escort, one member from each state and territory, accompanied the remains.
The grave assemblage appeared to have embarked on a pilgrimage transporting a sacred relic to its final resting place. As the black-draped carriage snaked along the 500-mile course to its destination in Massachusetts, flags flew at half-mast and people stood with heads bowed. At station stops businesses closed. In major cities the committee even had the coffin removed and positioned in a prominent place, such as Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where citizens could view it and honor the memory of the man therein. And multitudes came to pay their last respects. In New York City thousands lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the procession along the four-mile route to city hall, where the body lay in state. The massive outpouring of esteem displayed along the way mightily impressed the Illinois congressman on the Committee of Escort. Later he wrote that no such demonstration had previously occurred and would not again until the death and funeral train of Abraham Lincoln, and in that he would be right.5
Finally, after the funeral formalities had riveted the nation, on March 11 the procession arrived in Boston. A heavy rain prevented a planned public agenda, but a local committee met the train and transferred the casket to Faneuil Hall, the temple of city and state politics, where several held forth on the deceased’s contributions and merits. For the short ride to Quincy the local and national committees shepherded the remains aboard a special train pulled by a new locomotive, the John Quincy Adams. There in the church long attended by the Adamses, the local pastor and family friend conducted the final service. Truthfully, he informed the congregation, “Mr. Adams’ character is no exotic. It is the genuine growth of the American soil.” Then his coffin was borne across the street to the simple church graveyard where John Quincy Adams was laid to rest in the family vault.6
The respect and honors marking the passage from Washington exceeded those Adams had experienced in life, even compared with the mass outpouring of sentiment on his western tours back in 1843. In this instance as in that, certainly not everyone of those signaling their regard agreed with all his political positions, but they did recognize and take pride in his sovereign status as the one man whose link to the Founding Fathers was most indelible. He had actually known George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and, of course, his own father. Those men stood foremost among the venerated Founding Fathers, the individuals who had created the United States. Moreover, all of them, Franklin and Jefferson excepted, had appointed him to responsible offices. No other American of that time could match John Quincy’s rich lineage. His American contemporaries saw him in the words of a Virginia congressman as “a living bond of connexion [sic] between the present and the past.”7
In expounding upon the meaning of Adams’s life, everyone did not send the same message. The intellectual and religious milieu in which his own worldview had been formed and nurtured eulogized him with images and words that would surely have produced his assent, maybe tempered by his mother’s reproach of any expression of vanity. Concentrated in the North, especially New England and areas to the west heavily influenced by the New England diaspora, the overwhelmingly Whiggish clerics, academics, and politicians praised him as a Christian patriot. For them he not only provided continuity with the Founding Fathers; just as importantly, he embodied the glories of Puritanism in his commitment to Christian values, liberty, and industry.
In their scenario, as in his, the nation lamentably had rejected their noble way. In contrast, these mourners depicted a country commandeered by men from the backward South stained with vices like slavery, dueling, and indolence. The America of 1848 was only thirteen years away from the shots fired at Fort Sumter, and almost a score of years had passed since Adams had left the presidency. In their judgment the United States had devolved from the heroic founding. These sentiments chorused Adams’s own during his later years. And in the 1850s they would become the watchwords of the Republican party.8
In the disparaged region, however, Adams’s death did not generate sectional recrimination. Mentions of his New England heritage and loyalty did inevitably occur, but assertions quickly followed that even his personal and political enemies admitted that “a great spirit had departed.” From Virginia to Texas, Democratic and Whig newspapers alike celebrated him as “eminent a statesman” and a patriotic American. They portrayed him as a great man whose death was “a national calamity.” While acknowledging political differences, commentators declared that those disagreements should not preclude recognition of his lengthy public service and his devotion to his country. As “almost the sole existing link” to the colonial and Revolutionary past, his life connected those distant times to the present. In short, with few exceptions, editors, politicians, and correspondents honored his memory.9
The encomiums from the slave states would surely have pleased John Quincy Adams because they characterized him as he did himself. Yet they would also have puzzled him, at least somewhat. He would never have backed away from his slashing assault upon what he deemed “the transcendent power of slavery and the slave-representation.” While during his later years his unsuccessful onslaught left him pessimistic about the near future, he never lost hope that a just God would not permit the American vessel to capsize.10
Somehow under Providence’s guidance America would find the way to a slave-free future. Counseling Charles Francis on the ongoing struggle against what he regarded as the menacing navigation of the slavocracy, Adams commanded, “Proceed—Persevere—Never despair—don’t give up the ship.”11
