“No Government upon the Earth Is So Safe as Ours”
The 1826 Fourth of July celebration in Washington was most notable for the absence of the leaders who had made the annual celebration possible.
On June 14, Mayor Roger C. Weightman had written invitations to the four living former presidents—Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—as well as Charles Carroll of Carollton, the only living signer of the Declaration of Independence besides Adams and Jefferson. He asked, with the “highest respect and veneration,” that they “favor the city with your presence,” and offered to dispatch a special entourage to accompany them to Washington and then back to their homes.
All five men apologetically and humbly declined.
Adams, now ninety years old and living in Massachusetts, was “grateful for this mark of distinguished and respectful attention” but hoped Weightman would understand that the “present state of my health forbids me to indulge the hope of participating.” Madison, too, while complimenting Weightman for offering him the opportunity to reflect on the past and anticipate the future of the country, cited the “instability of my health” as a reason for failing to make the trip from Virginia. He assured the mayor that July 4 would forever be honored as the day “which gave birth to a nation, and to a system of self-government, making it a new epoch in the history of man.” For James Monroe, who did not receive the invitation until June 28, pressing personal engagements prevented him from traveling to Washington, a disappointment for him since he had “devoted my best efforts, through a long series of years, to the support of that great cause.” He would ultimately be honored in Richmond on July 4. Carroll, at age eighty-nine, did not specifically refer to his health but did point out that he had declined a similar invitation from the city of New York and thus could not, “with propriety,” attend the celebration in Washington.
Jefferson’s reply to Weightman was most moving.
In the last letter he would ever write, this man whose brilliant quill had smoothed and shaped and burnished the rough edges of political theory to create a gleaming, powerful, enduring testament to self-government, would again achieve the soaring eloquence he had demonstrated a half century earlier. In a June 24 letter from Monticello, which was reprinted in newspapers across the country, the eighty-three-year-old statesman thanked Weightman for his kind invitation, regretted that “ill health” forced him to decline, and acknowledged that it added to “the suffering of sickness” to be deprived of participating in the “rejoicing of that day.” This was particularly true, because he was one of the surviving signers “of an instrument, pregnant with our own and the fate of the world.”
The Declaration of Independence had established a tone for freedom and liberty that had infused the nation with confidence for fifty years; Jefferson had still higher hopes. “May it be to the world what I believe it will be (to some parties sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of rousing men to burst the chains … and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.… All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man.” The Declaration provided the “grounds of hope for others” to secure those rights, he added. “For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of those rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
These were Jefferson’s last words to a nation he had helped found. On the same day he took pen to paper to answer Weightman, Jefferson, in pain and losing strength, wrote to his doctor to call on him at Monticello. His physician confined him to bed. Thomas Jefferson—member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, author and signer of the Declaration of Independence, secretary of state, minister to France, president of the United States, and founder of the University of Virginia—now had but one final goal.
He wanted desperately to survive until the Fourth of July.
* * *
JEFFERSON SUCCEEDED, BUT ONLY barely, drawing his final breath just before 1:00 in the afternoon on Tuesday, July 4, 1826, significant not only because it coincided with the time the Declaration had been approved fifty years earlier but because it aligned with virtually the exact moment that the secretary of war, James Barbour, was appealing to Jubilee participants in Washington to contribute to a fund established to pay Jefferson’s extensive debts. Neither Barbour nor the rest of Washington would become aware of Jefferson’s death for another two days.
Jefferson, who, on the night before he died had refused any further medication from his doctor (“No, doctor, nothing more,” he said), died owing creditors more than $100,000, or as much as $2 million in today’s dollars. Barbour explained that “late rains [had] done immense and irreparable damage” to Jefferson’s estate; flooding in Virginia, followed by drought, over a period of several years had ruined the crops of many planters. There were other reasons for Jefferson’s woes, too, including a large loan that he had advanced to a friend who later defaulted, and—the down side of the country’s resurgent interest in its history and founders—the expense of providing food and drink to the thousands of people who had visited Monticello to pay homage to the third president. In the words of one historian, the Monticello throngs “ate up the substance of the philosopher who lived there.”
Barbour made his appeal on behalf of Jefferson in the House chamber after the formal Jubilee ceremonies had concluded. According to the National Intelligencer, a large number of citizens and government officials—led by President John Quincy Adams—stepped forward to sign the “subscription paper” to support the fundraising effort. No public dinner or event was scheduled as part of the effort to pay Jefferson’s debts, “experience being rather unfavorable to such, as involving a good deal of trouble with very little compensation in the nature of enjoyment.”
* * *
ASIDE FROM BARBOUR’S SOBER appeal to assist Jefferson, Jubilee festivities in Washington were full of pomp, pageantry, and patriotism.
Cannon salutes began at sunrise, with guns pounding from the navy yard, the Capitol, even the front lawn of the president’s house. Attorney General William Wirt’s teenage daughter, Catharine, awoke early in the day and could not get back to sleep. “The cannons were roaring around me in every direction,” she wrote to her sister. President Adams joined a military assemblage as they processed to the Capitol. The U.S. Telegraph reported that the floor of the House was “filled to overflowing” when they arrived, with ordinary citizens, members of the military, and foreign guests. The main Fourth of July address was delivered by attorney Walter Jones, who was married to the granddaughter of Richard Henry Lee, signer of the Declaration and the delegate who, on July 2, 1776, had offered the resolution to separate from Great Britain. Afterward, President Adams opened up the executive mansion to the general public as part of the celebration.
Similar celebrations occurred around the country, as millions of Americans cheered their country’s fiftieth anniversary—in Philadelphia, Boston, Albany, Newark, and New York City, where a huge banquet table was set to feed eight hundred residents. The New York American reported that oxen, roasted whole, were served as the main dish, while celebrants also enjoyed “an endless quantity of hams and loaves of bread, interspersed with barrels of beer and cider on tap.” Elsewhere, pelting rain did not dampen Jubilee celebrations in Cincinnati, or Salem, Indiana, or Lexington, Kentucky, or hundreds of other small towns across the nation.
Across the land, Americans toasted their fundamental freedoms and the bravery of those who had come before them. The Jubilee was also a celebration of Americans’ renewed knowledge of their history and an interest in the foundations of their government, and the safety and well-being that such knowledge and interest could promulgate. As the Ohio Oracle noted, “No government upon the earth is so safe as ours” because “no other people are so well informed.”
* * *
PRESIDENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS finally learned the circumstances of his father’s death on July 12.
After four grueling days on the road from Washington—“the weather was all the time fine, but the heat intense,” he wrote in his diary—he and his son arrived in Boston and checked in to the Hamilton Exchange Hotel. The president’s other son, George, who resided in Boston, joined them and stayed until one o’clock in the morning recounting the story of his grandfather’s last moments and his funeral. George arrived at John Adams’s side just before his grandfather died—Adams recognized his grandson and made an effort to speak to him but without success. “George received his expiring breath between five and six in the afternoon,” John Quincy wrote.
John Adams’s physician later told the president that when town leaders had asked his father on June 30 for a Fourth of July toast, he had declared: “Independence forever.” Asked if he would like to add something more, he replied, “Not a word.” On the day of his death, when Adams had been informed that it was the Fourth of July, he had responded, “It is a great day. It is a good day,” and was quiet for a time.
But then, around one o’clock in the afternoon, just a few hours from his death, John Adams reportedly whispered in a voice loud enough to be heard by those present in the room: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
Whether John Adams actually spoke the final word is a matter of conjecture. John Quincy Adams’s diary acknowledges that his father’s physician heard the words “Thomas Jefferson,” but recalled that the word “survives” was “indistinctly and imperfectly uttered.” Regardless, John Quincy’s July 21 diary entry—in which he quoted his father’s deathbed words as “Thomas Jefferson survives”—soon became part of the already amazing story of the juxtaposed deaths of Adams and Jefferson. Whatever word Adams spoke after “Thomas Jefferson,” the reference to his fellow Declaration signer escaped his lips at nearly the exact time of Jefferson’s death hundreds of miles away, a fact that only added to the founders’ legend and legacy. Their lives had been intertwined for half a century; their accomplishments and contributions on behalf of their nation were unparalleled save perhaps by those of George Washington.
John Adams had spoken no more, his son learned, until moments before he passed. Finally, to his granddaughter, Susanna, who was sitting vigil at his bedside, he whispered his final words: “Help me, child. Help me.”
John Adams, a giant in the movement for America’s independence and the country’s second president, died at about 6:20 in the evening on July 4, 1826. He was ninety.
His son, President John Quincy Adams, was comforted by his physician’s assessment that “his death was the mere cessation of the functions of nature by old age, without disease.”
* * *
THE PRESIDENT LEARNED THAT as many as 4,000 people had attended his father’s funeral on July 7 in Quincy, including the governor of Massachusetts, the president of Harvard, many members of the legislature, and Congressman Daniel Webster. Cannon fired and bells pealed as the solemn procession made its way from the Adams house to the First Congregational Church.
The death of his father affected John Quincy in ways that surprised him. Despite his resigned acceptance of John Adams’s demise when he first learned about it from the tavern owner in Maryland, the president’s arrival in Quincy elicited a far deeper and more profound response. When he entered the family homestead and walked into his father’s bedchamber, the place John Quincy had “last taken leave of him and where I had most sat with him at my last two yearly visits to him,” the president was wracked with grief. “That moment was inexpressibly painful, and struck me as if it had been an arrow to my heart,” he confided to his diary. “My father and my 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 round, is stronger than I ever felt it before.”
Later, the president attended a service at the family church and was again touched, this time by the ghosts of his parents’ presence. “I have at no time felt more deeply affected by that event than on entering the meeting house and taking in his pew the seat which he used to occupy,” John Quincy wrote. “The memory of my father and mother, of their tender and affectionate care, of the times of peril in which we then lived, and of the hopes and fears which left their impressions upon my mind, came over me, till involuntary tears started from my eyes.”
John Quincy Adams remained in the Boston area until October before returning to Washington. During that time, the fifty-nine-year-old president thought often about his own mortality, encountered a cousin he had not seen in fifty years, conducted as much state business as he could away from the capital, attended numerous sermons and memorial services in honor of his father, and nearly drowned when a ferry in which he was traveling almost capsized in a raging rainstorm. Of these, he found the eulogies were most emotionally exhausting; the speakers all meant well, of course, and the general public found them appropriate to express its affection to the departed John Adams. But for John Quincy, the recurring homage paid to his father was a constant reminder of his aching grief.
“I have received high though melancholy gratification from these performances,” the president noted, “but found myself much, too much, overcome with fatigue.”
* * *
AS NEWS SPREAD ACROSS the country of the July 4 deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Americans everywhere expressed sentiments similar to John Quincy’s: the loss of the two great statesmen went far beyond coincidence and entered the realm of “divine favor.”
In his dazzling August 2 speech at Harvard, before a crowd of 4,000 (“a greater concourse of people than I ever witnessed in Boston,” John Quincy Adams noted), Congressman Daniel Webster exemplified the spiritual tone of virtually every eulogist in the land. He inspired and moved the crowd when he said, “The tears which flow, and the honors that are paid, when the founders of the republic die, give hope that the republic itself may be immortal.” The gifts bequeathed by Adams and Jefferson “leave the world all light, all on fire.”
They had ensured the success of the revolution, “one of the greatest events in history.” They had brought forth free representative government. It’s no wonder, then, Webster opined, that the conjunction of their deaths on the nation’s fiftieth birthday was a “special dispensation” from the deity, “proof that our country, and its benefactors, are objects of His care.”
Again and again, speakers and citizens looked to the deaths of Adams and Jefferson on July 4, 1826, as divine intervention in the nation’s affairs. As Caleb Cushing of Newburyport, Massachusetts, intoned in his eulogy: “Had the horses and chariot of fire descended to take up the patriarchs, it might have been more wonderful—but not more glorious.”
The deaths of Adams and Jefferson reawakened the nation to the ideals of liberty, equality, and self-government that the two patriots had stood for throughout the revolutionary period and, indeed, for their entire lives. The Declaration of Independence embodied those ideals; that the two greatest contributors to the sacred document had died on the fiftieth anniversary of its adoption meant that those ideals, and the Declaration itself, contained the blessings of a higher power. It was “the venerated instrument that declared our separation from Great Britain,” one speaker in Philadelphia said. It was the document that defined “the native equality of the human race as the true foundations of all political, of all human institutions,” offered another orator.
The Declaration, a Virginia speaker pointed out, was the manifesto that awakened a “mighty spirit” that “walks upon the earth,” and during its travels will “tramp thrones and scepters in the dust.”
If Americans needed any more validation to support their newfound reverence for the Declaration, they received it when word circulated around the country of Thomas Jefferson’s epitaph chiseled upon the obelisk that marked his grave at Monticello. Jefferson had clearly specified his wishes, and he ignored any reference to most of his lofty accomplishments. Instead, Jefferson wished most to be remembered for eternity for his work on behalf of both academic and governmental freedom. The inscription reads:
HERE WAS BURIED
THOMAS JEFFERSON
AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE,
OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM,
AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
* * *
THE PROVIDENTIAL AURA OF the Fourth of July did not end with the 1826 Jubilee.
Former president and Revolutionary War hero James Monroe, who as secretary of state had warned President Madison to “remove the records” prior to the 1814 British attack on Washington, died on July 4, 1831, exactly five years after Adams and Jefferson—fifty-five years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
John Quincy Adams, by then a member of Congress (the only former president to become a congressman), delivered a long and stirring eulogy in Boston, noting the legacy that Monroe and other revolutionaries had left their nation. “It remains for you,” Adams told the audience, “only to transmit the same peerless legacy, unimpaired, to your children of the next succeeding age.”
* * *
A LITTLE MORE THAN one year later, on November 14, 1832, Charles Carroll, the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence, died in Baltimore at the age of ninety-five. His eulogist, Philadelphia statesman John Sergeant, noted that his signature upon the Declaration was the highest honor he could ever achieve. “As he was for many years the single representative on earth of the Congress of 1776, his grave seems to be the grave of the whole,” Sergeant said. “It is finally closed, and we are assembled around it for the last time.”
What the Declaration signers had left, Sergeant said, “is now entirely ours—ours to enjoy, and ours, be it remembered, with the favour of Providence, to preserve.”
* * *
JAMES MADISON DID NOT quite reach the Fourth of July.
He died on the morning of June 28, 1836, at home in his Montpelier estate in Virginia. On the morning of Madison’s death, Paul Jennings, his manservant, reported that the father of the Constitution and the former president had difficulty swallowing his breakfast. Minutes later, “his head instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out.”
Fittingly, perhaps, Madison was the final Constitution signer to die—he outlived all the other founders and framers.
In March 1837, fifty years after the Constitutional Convention and nine months after Madison’s death, the U.S. Congress agreed to purchase most of his papers from his wife Dolley for the sum of $30,000. For years prior to her husband’s death, Dolley had worked closely with James to prepare the papers for publication. After Madison passed, Dolley believed it was her “deep and sacred charge” to publish her husband’s papers; indeed, the “important trust” sustained her in the weeks and months following his death. She devoted herself to the task, writing that the publication of Madison’s papers “will form the surest evidence of his claim to the gratitude of his country and the world.”
Madison himself had come under some criticism for altering portions of the notes in later years, in part to more accurately reflect the official Constitutional Convention journal and, in part, for the less noble reason of aligning the older records with his evolving stance on the dangers of an overreaching federal government, his support for a bill of rights, and other topics. For the most part, though, his notes and recollections are an accurate, amazing, and valuable literary tour de force, one of the great contributions to American history. What the nation frustratingly lacks from the 1776 Continental Congress’s Declaration of Independence debates, Madison bequeathed to the nation from the Constitutional Convention of 1787—a full accounting of the arguments, speeches, and rationale of delegates as they formed the opinions that would lead to their final decisions.
Madison’s notes provide a day-by-day account of the most remarkable summer in the nation’s existence, when, in just 120 days, delegates created a government unlike any other in history.
Dolley Madison recognized the importance of her husband’s papers when she wrote to President Andrew Jackson in August 1836, shortly after Madison’s death: “I am now preparing to execute his confidence reposed in me—that of placing before Congress and the World what his pen had prepared for their use, and with the importance of this Legacy, I am deeply impressed.”
Fifty-three years after the delegates had debated in Philadelphia, James Madison’s Constitutional Convention volumes were published in 1840 under the direction of Henry D. Gilpin, solicitor of the U.S. Treasury and, later, attorney general of the United States.
* * *
A YEAR AFTER MADISON’S papers were published, in June 1841, Secretary of State Daniel Webster made a fateful decision about the original engrossed and signed copy of the Declaration of Independence. Webster’s intentions were noble—his goal was to display the precious document for visitors to Washington to view and enjoy—but the impact of his actions did further physical harm to the nation’s founding document. Webster did not comment on his reasoning, but perhaps Madison’s death—the de facto end of the revolutionary and constitutional era—prompted him to keep the spirit of the founders and framers alive in the hearts and minds of Americans.
In any case, on June 11, Webster wrote to the commissioner of patents, Henry L. Ellsworth, who was then occupying a new building in Washington (now the National Portrait Gallery), a white stone structure at the corner of 7th and F streets. The Patent Office was a bureau of the State Department, and Webster had learned that “there is in the new building, appropriated to the Patent Office, suitable accommodations for the safe-keeping as well as the exhibition of various articles now deposited in this [State] Department.” The new location would be suitable to display certain documents, and thus, Webster said to Ellsworth: “I have directed them to be transmitted to you.” An inventory accompanied Webster’s letter. Item 6 was the Declaration of Independence.
Workers at the Patent Office mounted the Declaration and George Washington’s commission as commander in chief together in a single frame and placed it opposite a tall window where both documents were exposed to the “chill of winter and the glare and heat of summer.” Both documents remained on exhibit for the next thirty-five years—until 1876—even after the Patent Office separated from the State Department and became part of the Interior Department. The prolonged exposure to sunlight, especially, accelerated the deterioration of ink and the parchment of the Declaration, which, by the end of this period, would be approaching 100 years of age.
As early as 1856, a writer for the United States Magazine referred to the Declaration as “that old looking paper with the fading ink.” Several years later, another writer concurred: “It is old and yellow, and the ink is fading from the paper.” And in 1870, Historical Magazine warned: “The original manuscripts of the Declaration and of Washington’s Commission … are said to be fading out, so that, in a few years, only the naked parchments will remain.”
America’s most important document, epitomizing a people’s unbreakable will to live in freedom—created by the indomitable spirit of the founders, given enduring life through the bloodshed of patriots, rescued from destruction by the brave and swift action of public servants, immortalized by the Jubilee of 1826—was, as the nation approached its centennial, in grave danger from simple wear and tear.