“I Had Flattered Myself That He Would Survive the Summer”
July 9, 1826
After making a note in his diary of the 4:39 a.m. sunrise, President John Quincy Adams wasted no time departing the White House. By 5:00 a.m., he was gripping the reins and directing the four-horse team that pulled his private carriage, accompanied only by his twenty-three-year-old son, John II (named after his famous grandfather). The previous day had been the hottest of the summer, and the Adams men were hoping to make headway on their long journey northward while a light easterly breeze cooled the early morning.
The president had decided only a day earlier to leave Washington, so he’d been forced to make preparations quickly. He’d sent his servant ahead separately, laden with heavy storage trunks to load onto a stagecoach, believing he and his son could travel more rapidly in the horse-drawn carriage. The impetus for his haste occurred with the arrival of the White House mail on July 8: John Quincy had received three letters from family members in Massachusetts informing him that his father, John Adams, was nearing death. The venerable former president and signer of the Declaration of Independence, just a few months shy of his ninety-first birthday, was “rapidly sinking,” according to John Quincy’s brother Thomas. His doctor thought Adams would “probably not survive two days, and certainly not more than a fortnight,” in the words of John Quincy’s niece Susan Clark. The elder Adams had “suffered much.” The situation was so dire that the president’s family had sent an express for John Quincy’s eldest son, George, who was in Boston at the time, with the hopes that he would arrive in nearby Quincy “in time to receive his [grandfather’s] last breath.”
The news from Boston left John Quincy Adams shaken. On the night of July 8, he “was up, in anxiety and apprehension, till near midnight. The suddenness of the notice of my father’s danger was quite unexpected.” Indeed, his brother had written weeks earlier informing John Quincy that their father’s health was declining, “though not so as to occasion immediate alarm.” The president had planned a visit in August. “I had flattered myself that he would survive this summer, and even other years,” he confided to his diary.
It was a time of much emotion for President John Quincy Adams. He had learned two days earlier that Thomas Jefferson had died on July 4, fifty years to the day that the Declaration of Independence had been adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. John Quincy’s relationship with the Declaration’s author was mixed and had changed with time. As a young man, Adams declared Jefferson “a man of great judgment” on political matters. When the Adams and Jefferson families would visit each other, Thomas Jefferson took an interest in John Quincy’s educational progress; the two talked about books, school, philosophy and other topics. Later, though, and especially during the contentious presidential contest between John Quincy’s father and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the relationship between the two families had frayed. As Jefferson and the senior John Adams aged, the two had resumed correspondence, and their relationship had become more cordial, if not overly friendly. John Quincy and the rest of the Adams family had adopted a similar outlook in their relationships with Jefferson.
John Quincy Adams’s secretary of war had brought word on July 6 that at midday on the Fourth of July, while Americans across the country were celebrating the Jubilee to mark fifty years of independence, Jefferson had passed at Monticello at the age of eighty-two. His time of death—around 1:00 p.m. on July 4, 1826—came on the same day and at roughly the same time that the Declaration had been adopted a half century earlier. That the Declaration’s primary author had expired on the document’s fiftieth anniversary was “a strange and very striking coincidence,” John Quincy Adams noted in his diary.
As he departed Washington on the morning of July 9, the president, literally, didn’t know the half of it.
* * *
PRESIDENT ADAMS AND JOHN II stopped for a half-hour refreshment break between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., and reached Merrill’s Tavern in Waterloo, Maryland, at approximately 11:00 a.m. It was then that proprietor John A. Merrill, who had visited Baltimore earlier that morning, interrupted their breakfast to deliver bad news. He’d received word by messenger from Massachusetts that the president’s father had died on July 4 at about six o’clock in the afternoon.
Later, a family friend would write to the president that at the moment of John Adams’s death, a violent thunderstorm that had shaken the house subsided, the rain stopped, and the early evening sun emerged, “bursting forth … with uncommon splendor at the moment of his exit … with a sky beautiful and grand beyond description.” Now, at Merrill’s Tavern, John Quincy Adams wrestled with his emotions. “From the letters which I had yesterday received, this event was so much expected by me that it had no sudden and violent effect on my feelings.” He adopted a philosophical tone, noting that “my father had nearly closed the ninety-first year of his life—a life illustrious in the annals of his country and of the world. He had served to great and useful purpose his nation, his age, and his God.” John Quincy could only hope that he “may live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came.”
That both his father and Thomas Jefferson, the leading proponents of American independence, had perished on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration’s adoption struck John Quincy Adams not as mere coincidence but as “visible and palpable marks of Divine favor, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe.” The date’s special meaning extended even further for the president: his son, John II, who sat beside him in his carriage as they trekked northward, had been born on July 4, 1803, assuring that future independence days would conjure a wide range of emotions for John Quincy. Later he would call the July 4, 1826, departures of the two former presidents and signers of the Declaration of Independence a dual event that was “unparalleled in the history of the world.”
As details emerged about the last days and moments of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the nation would interpret their deaths in the same manner.
* * *
IN THE FIFTY YEARS since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the nation had undergone monumental change—its size, population, and advancements in technology, transportation, and international clout would have made it barely recognizable to those who helped found it in 1776.
The nation’s population had quadrupled in fifty years and now approached 12 million people residing in twenty-four states, two of which lay beyond the Mississippi River. Thomas Jefferson’s audacious Louisiana Purchase in 1803 had doubled the nation’s territory, and John Quincy Adams’s successful efforts while secretary of state to establish joint occupation of the Oregon Territory with the British meant that, in one capacity or another, America actually stretched from sea to sea.
Concurrently, Americans were inventing ways to overcome these vast distances. The 365-mile Erie Canal, which reduced from three weeks to eight days the length of time it took to haul goods from New York City to Buffalo, opened up boat traffic from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes and the great Northwest. Built over eight years by tens of thousands of workers, the canal had been dedicated in the fall of 1825, and by July 1826, one publication boasted that “three or four hundred boats” now passed through the booming city of Utica every week; in addition, more than 100 canal projects were under way across the country. And Gridley Bryant of Scituate, Massachusetts, had started work in April 1826 on the nation’s first commercial railroad, which he designed to transport huge granite blocks from a quarry in Quincy, Massachusetts, to the Neponset River just a few miles away. The blocks would be needed to erect the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, which Bryant had the contract to build and whose cornerstone had been laid in June 1825. Bryant, whose railroad design was met with ridicule by many and skepticism by many more, had ushered in a powerful transportation force that would reshape America over the next century and beyond. Seeing the potential for passenger travel, Baltimore journalist Hezekiah Niles wrote in May 1826: “A person may now breakfast with his family in Baltimore, or Philadelphia, and take tea with his neighbor in Philadelphia or New York, respectively.”
In his 1825 annual message to Congress, President John Quincy Adams announced that in the preceding two years, more than a thousand new post offices had been established in the United States. He also called for a system of federal roads and canals, a national university and observatory, an expedition to explore the Northwest, and the creation of a Department of the Interior. He urged Congress to approve big ideas and projects that would benefit the people, and not to turn its back on “the bounties of Providence and doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority.”
Internationally, the United States supported Latin American peoples in their efforts to achieve independence, and recognized in 1822 the republics of Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Peru. President James Monroe’s doctrine of December 1823 declared that any intervention by a European power in the Western Hemisphere could be viewed only “as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition to the United States.”
In the midst of this national transformation, Americans would finally take stock of their heritage and history in the decade following the War of 1812, after years of overlooking or ignoring both.
* * *
AMERICA’S LACK OF INTEREST in its history had troubled the aging founders.
In 1815, Thomas Jefferson had asked in a letter to John Adams: “On the subject of the history of the American revolution, you ask who shall write it? Who can write it? And who will ever be able to write it?”
In Jefferson’s view, records alone were insufficient to capture the spirit and depth of the behind-closed-doors discussions and debates that led to independence. He believed that for years the country had neglected those who could have enriched the nation’s heritage with colorful first-person stories. “These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown,” he lamented, except to those who were present. The nation was running out of time—Jefferson, Adams, and Charles Carroll of Maryland were the last remaining signers of the Declaration of Independence, and all three were over seventy; Adams was eighty. John Adams worried as early as January 1817 that his country had forgotten its historical precedents: “I see no disposition to celebrate or remember, or even Curiosity to enquire into the Characters, Actions, or Events of the Revolution.”
Indeed, as the North American Review of 1826 explained it, the founders themselves had little time to reflect on their history because they were so busy making it. After the Revolutionary War, “the whole country was miserably exhausted by the exertions and sufferings incident to the arduous struggle, and all became engaged … in repairing their wasted fortunes.” The revolutionists faced other daunting challenges, including the creation of a new government, threats from European nations that hoped to intimidate the new republic, internal party squabbles as the United States established its domestic footing, and finally, of course, the War of 1812 and the brazen British invasion and burning of Washington.
For those reasons, the magazine pointed out, “we are not to look at the early years of our national progress … for any very intense interest in the history of the revolution.”
However, with the near destruction of Washington fresh in their minds, Americans experienced an upwelling of national pride, a decade-long reawakening of the achievements of the revolutionary generation. After the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, Americans were ready for “the principles, causes, events, and characters of the revolutions” to claim “their just share of public attention.” As John Adams and Thomas Jefferson grew older, the new generation paid greater heed to their bequests to America. In the ten-year period leading up to the 1826 Jubilee, Americans took stock of their contemporary status and tied their accomplishments, successes, and good fortune to the achievements and the sacrifices of the revolutionary generation—the founders and the framers. It was as though their successful efforts to turn aside the British for a second time established for Americans their permanent place in the world; and the near destruction of Washington reminded them of the blessings of freedom and liberty that they might have taken for granted and come so close to losing.
This attitude was manifested most prominently in American feelings toward the Declaration of Independence and other revolutionary era records, as well as to the men who had created them, the founding generation, those who had risked everything—their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor—to bring forth a new nation.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER JOHN ADAMS expressed his disappointment in 1817 that Americans had lost touch with their history, Congress commissioned artist John Trumbull to create four large paintings to commemorate the American Revolution; the paintings would hang in the rotunda of the new Capitol building. Of these, the most important was his depiction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which he exhibited to large and enthusiastic crowds in Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia before delivering it to Washington. “Indeed,” wrote historian Pauline Maier, “of all the paintings [Trumbull] completed for the Capitol, the Declaration of Independence was the greatest popular success.”
Americans’ enthusiasm also extended to written documents and records from the revolutionary era, and the founders themselves joined in the excitement. In 1815, while James Madison was president, Thomas Jefferson finally became the first person outside of Madison’s family to read and review the chief executive’s Constitutional Convention notes. Jefferson marveled at their thoroughness. “Do you know,” he wrote to John Adams, “that there exists in manuscript the ablest work of this kind ever yet executed of the debates of the constitutional convention of Philadelphia in [1787]? The whole of everything said and done there was taken down by Mr. Madison, with a labor and exactness beyond comprehension.”
Jefferson was certainly correct that the written word alone could not convey the entire story of the country’s founding. Yet, precisely because the first-hand stories of the secret sessions and the men who participated in them would soon be lost to history, the written records were essential to build the historical foundation of the United States. If the country had neglected to capture and preserve the recollections of the founders themselves, it would not make the same mistake with the documentary trail of America’s creation. After the burning of Washington, Americans had become acutely aware of the need to refer to, organize, protect, and preserve the documents that literally defined their nation and government. Perhaps enemy attacks were not the greatest danger after the Treaty of Ghent, but fear of natural disasters and the most destructive force to written records—fire—were top of mind.
In March 1818, Congress directed the publication of the journal of the Constitutional Convention (not Madison’s copious notes, but the rather sparse official journal), along with the secret journals and the foreign correspondence of the Continental Congress from the first meeting to the date of the ratification of the peace treaty between Great Britain and the United States. The resolution authorized the president to “suppress such parts of the foreign correspondence as he might consider improper at the time to publish.” John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, was already negotiating with Boston printer Thomas Wait to publish the papers. Wait had proposed “to print, and deliver at the city of Washington, the Journals of the convention which formed the Constitution, also the Secret Journals of Congress and its correspondence with foreign powers prior to the treaty of peace of 1783, at two dollars for a volume of five hundred pages in strong leather binding.”
Adams accepted the proposal, and Wait first printed the journals of the Constitutional Convention. On November 25, 1819, he shipped 500 copies of the printed book to Washington aboard the schooner Adams, and by the second week in December, he had produced 500 more. Next, the printer went to work on the secret Journals of the Continental Congress, and in October 1821, he sent John Quincy Adams a “bill of lading of the four volumes” (1,000 copies) for the heretofore unpublished journals.
* * *
INTEREST IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE also soared.
In 1818 and 1819, two enterprising engravers, Benjamin Owen Tyler and John Binns, saw a commercial opportunity and engaged in a bitter competition to produce the first engraved facsimile of the historic document. Tyler finished first, producing a version in 1818 with the initial lines of text formed in a decorative arched heading, and a number of phrases in bold lettering different from the remainder of the text. However, while the Tyler engraved text was not in facsimile, the signatures below were full-sized reproductions in the arrangement seen on the original document.
In 1819, Binns published his engraving, with a text reduced in size and full-size facsimile signatures, rearranged to fit inside the oval border that encircled the text. The border included circular medallion portraits of George Washington, John Hancock, and Thomas Jefferson surrounding the top half of the text and the seals of the thirteen original states around the lower half.
Both versions sold well, but both Binns and Tyler continued their feud as to which facsimile was “official”—although neither was an exact replica of the original. In addition, prior to completing his version, Tyler had, in 1817, requested acting secretary of state Richard Rush—son of signer Benjamin Rush—to attest to the accuracy of his work by comparing it to the original engrossed and signed Declaration. In the lower left corner of Tyler’s facsimile, Rush wrote his endorsement, but also included a cautionary phrase: “The foregoing copy of the Declaration of Independence has been collated with the original instrument and found correct. I have myself examined the signatures to each. Those executed by Mr. Tyler are curiously exact imitations, so much so, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the closest scrutiny to distinguish them, were it not for the hand of time, from the originals.”
Rush’s “hand of time” allusion implies that the years had not been kind to the founders’ signatures on the original version of the Declaration. That fact, along with the brisk sales of the Binns-Tyler facsimiles and the ongoing spat between the two engravers over who should be credited with the official facsimile version, convinced John Quincy Adams to take action.
In 1820, he commissioned Washington engraver William J. Stone to create on a copper plate an “exact facsimile” of both the engrossed declaration text and the signatures. The copies ultimately produced from Stone’s work would establish the visual image of the Declaration of Independence for generations of Americans to come.
But in the process, Stone may have done further harm to the original.
* * *
WILLIAM STONE SPENT THREE full years painstakingly replicating the original, creating the first and only exact facsimile ever produced in time for the Fourth of July celebrations in 1823. On June 5, the National Intelligencer in Washington reported that “Mr. William J. Stone, a respectable and enterprising Engraver of this City, has, after a labor of three years, completed a fac simile of the original of the Declaration of Independence, now in the archives of the government; that it is executed with the greatest exactness and fidelity; and that the Department of State has become the purchaser of the plate.”
The 200 official parchment copies produced from Stone’s plate carry the identification “Engraved by W. J. Stone for the Department of State, by order” in the upper left corner, followed by “of J. Q. Adams, Sec. of State July 4 1823,” in the upper right corner. According to the National Archives, unofficial copies struck later do not carry the identification at the top of the document. Instead, Stone identified his work by engraving “W. J. Stone SC, Washn.” near the lower left corner and burnishing out the earlier identification.
Congress ordered the original 200 copies distributed: Jefferson, Adams, and Carroll of Carrollton each received two copies, as did President James Monroe, Vice President Daniel D. Tompkins, former President James Madison, and the Marquis de Lafayette. The House of Representatives and the Senate each received twenty copies and the various departments of government each received twelve copies. The remaining copies were sent to governors and legislatures of the states and territories and various colleges and universities in the United States.
If Stone’s facsimile ensured that future generations would be able to view an exact replica of the Declaration of Independence, it may have also contributed to the deterioration of the original. Historians and document experts have long debated whether Stone employed the common eighteenth-century practice of making a “wet-press copy” of the Declaration. Such copies were produced by placing a damp sheet of thin paper on a manuscript and pressing it until a small portion of the ink was transferred. The thin paper copy was retained in the same way as a carbon copy, and the ink was reimposed on a copper plate, which was then etched so the copies could be run off the plate on a press. This so-called wet-transfer method may have been used by Stone and could have lifted ink from the original version.
Others have argued that Stone meticulously traced the original during the three years the Declaration was in his shop and did not use the wet-transfer method, and some evidence bears this out. Acting Secretary Rush’s 1817 “hand of time” comment about the Tyler facsimile indicates that the original declaration had deteriorated prior to Stone’s work. In addition, the second half of the National Intelligencer story in June 1823 points out that the newspaper was thankful that Stone’s exact facsimile had been completed, “for the original [Declaration] which ought to be immortal and imperishable, by being so much handled by copyists and curious visitors, might receive serious injury.” Stone’s facsimile “rendered further exposure of the original unnecessary.”
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was no “copyist” or “curious visitor,” but he also handled the original parchment copy when he borrowed it from William Stone’s shop in the summer of 1821.
He needed it to punctuate what would become his most memorable speech and one of the nation’s most defining foreign policy addresses.
* * *
AS ADAMS MOUNTED THE speaker’s platform and approached the rostrum in the House of Representatives on July 4, 1821, he carried with him the original signed and engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence.
His first task, assigned by the House, was to read the Declaration aloud in its entirety; his second, to comment upon it. “Two topics struck me as preeminently involved in it,” he wrote later, “the cause of man and the cause of our country.” He admitted that he had little time to prepare his remarks, and was concerned that the content of his speech would be perceived as official American policy—when he first received the invitation he believed he might be “tongue-tied by my place.” But after “brooding” about the request, “I made up my mind to risk it and take the consequences.”
Adams spoke from his heart. In a fiery speech, he drew on the Declaration of Independence to accomplish several goals: to extol the virtues of his country and its founders; to discourage America’s intervention in ongoing revolutions in South America and Europe; to set the stage for the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European nations that interference in North and South American affairs would be viewed as acts of aggression against the United States; and to respond to British criticism of America’s lack of contributions to the world by drawing sharp contrasts between the former’s reliance on power and the latter’s dedication to liberty. Perhaps rebuking England was impolitic, but it was unavoidable and inevitable since America’s independence and founding were so tied to the behavior of its former mother country. It was impossible to point out the genius of the Declaration—“which distinguishes it from any other public document ever penned by man”—without drawing contrasts with other countries, touching upon “topics of peculiar delicacy,” and “coming into collision with principles which the British government itself might disclaim.”
And most recently, Adams reminded his audience, was Great Britain’s unjust swipe at the United States, when several English officials had asked: “What has America done for the benefit of mankind?”
* * *
AMERICANS AND THE WORLD needed to remember, Adams said, that the document he now held was “the first solemn Declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government. It was the cornerstone of a new fabric—destined to cover the surface of the globe.”
What the Declaration of Independence accomplished, what his father and the other signers had achieved, “demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away as all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude.” Most of all, he thundered, it “announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the unalienable sovereignty of the people” and produced a compact between the people and their government that was “no figment of the imagination, but a real, solid, and sacred bond of the social union.”
What happened on July 4, 1776, Adams explained, could be stated with poetic and profound simplicity: “A nation was born in a day.”
What had America done to benefit mankind? The United States would not presume to compete with Britain “for the prize of music, painting, or sculpture,” Adams said, nor could we contend with Britain’s “chemists … or the ardent gaze of your astronomers.” What America’s greatest contribution has been is to proclaim to mankind the “inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundation of government.” America has “uniformly spoken … often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and equal rights.”
And it had done so at home and abroad, he emphasized. In nearly half a century, Adams stressed, “without a single exception,” America has “respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining its own.” Unlike Great Britain, it “has abstained from interference in the concerns of others.” In perhaps his most memorable passage of the entire speech, Adams set the tone for U.S. foreign policy for years to come when he stressed that while his country would sympathize with other nations seeking independence—with “her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers”—outright interference, even in the cause of liberty, would contradict the principles of the Declaration.
America, Adams proclaimed, “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” America would champion freedom only “by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.” Her commitment was to freedom, to the power of the idea. Unlike Great Britain and the other nations of Europe for centuries heretofore, “her march is the march of mind, her glory is not dominion, but liberty.”
As his audience applauded, Adams pressed on.
The best way for the nation to honor its forebears who had created the Declaration of Independence, and the nearly half century of American sovereignty, was to adhere to these principles in matters of foreign affairs. America’s actions had set a shining example for the world in 1776, and the world would judge the nation by its actions in 1821. The Declaration of Independence “stands, and must forever stand alone, a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light … a light of salvation and redemption to the oppressed.”
John Quincy Adams was reinforcing the philosophy that America’s example, not its interference, was the best way to spread freedom around the world. America would remain a beacon by strengthening its own constitutional republic and defending its home front.
In international affairs, its interests—and the universal ideal of human liberty—would best be served by its restraint rather than its aggression.
* * *
ADAMS WAS SURPRISED BY the publicity his speech generated, and he expressed his gratitude that the “hasty composition” had commanded his audience’s “unremitting, riveted attention, with more than one occasional burst of applause.” Adams made it clear that the “sentiments were indeed exclusively my own,” and did not reflect official U.S. policy, but he had no reason to believe President Monroe or anyone else in the administration would “disclaim” his ideas.
In fact, John Quincy Adams had used the Declaration of Independence not only to honor his father’s generation and vindicate the colonies’ separation from Great Britain but also as the rationale for America’s future foreign policy. He had chosen July 4, 1821, the forty-fifth anniversary of the Declaration’s adoption, not as an occasion “for flinching from … our peculiar and imperishable principles,” but “to avail myself of the opportunity of asserting them.”
Five years later, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated those imperishable principles during its fifty-year Jubilee, the last day on earth for both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.