JOHN QUINCY ADAMS never learned that the war had ended. “A mournful and agitating event occurred in the House of Representatives yesterday,” a reporter covering Congress wrote in the last week of February 1848. “Just after the yeas and nays were taken on a question, and the speaker had risen to put another question to the house, a sudden cry was heard on the left of the chair: ‘Mr. Adams is dying!’ ”
Everyone looked toward the place where the former president was accustomed to sit. Adams had not been in good health; his attacks on slavery and its minions had grown rarer and weaker. Yet he continued to vote his conscience, which increasingly was the conscience of New England and the North on slavery. He could have retired; many of his colleagues, especially from the South, wished he would. But that conscience kept him at his post, watchful lest the slave power seize more than it already possessed.
“We beheld the venerable man in the act of falling over the left arm of his chair, while his right arm was extended, grasping his desk for support,” the reporter continued. “He would have dropped upon the floor had he not been caught in the arms of the member sitting next him. A great sensation was created in the house, members from all quarters rushing from their seats and gathering round the fallen statesman, who was immediately lifted into the area in front of the clerk’s table.” The speaker asked for a motion to adjourn, which was offered and accepted, and the business of the House halted. A sofa was brought in from the hallway and Adams gently laid upon it. The sofa was carried out of the chamber to the rotunda, where the air was fresher. But the sofa was soon surrounded by congressmen and senators, the latter having left their own chamber on learning of Adams’s distress. A representative who was also a physician tried to push the crowd back; this failing, he directed that the sofa be carried to the door leading from the rotunda to the east portico. The door was opened and the breeze allowed to blow onto Adams’s face. But the winter air was cold and damp and threatened to chill the patient. The sofa was carried back into the Capitol and placed in the suite of the speaker of the House. The doors of the suite were closed and guarded to keep well-wishers and onlookers at a distance. This proved necessary, for as the word of Adams’s condition spread across Washington, people hurried to the Capitol to catch sight of the city’s foremost living monument.
Adams stirred slightly. Those closest to him caught what proved to be his final words. “This is the last of earth,” he said. “I am content.”
He fell silent. He lay insensible on the sofa in the speaker’s room, unable to recognize his wife, Louisa, when she arrived, or anyone else. Doctors debated whether to move him. But the end seemed nigh, and the conclusion was easily reached that the stubborn statesman would have wanted to die on duty, in the building where he had fought his most worthy battles. He held on through one night, and then a day and another night. On February 23, his indomitable spirit finally let go.