Quote of the Day (John Quincy Adams, on the Deaths of His Father and Thomas Jefferson)

“[Tavernkeeper John] Merrill told me that he had come this morning out from Baltimore, and was informed there that my father died on the fourth of this Month, about five o’clock in the afternoon. 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— 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— He is gone, and may the blessing of Almighty Grace have attended him to his Account— I say not, may my last End be like his! it were presumptuous— The time, the manner, the coincidence with the decease of Jefferson, are visible and palpable marks of divine favour, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe— For myself all that I dare to ask is that I may live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came, and at the appointed hour of my maker die as my father has died; in peace with God and man, sped to the regions of futurity with the blessings of my fellow men.”—John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), Sixth President of the United States, diary entry for July 9, 1826, in Diaries 1821-1848, edited by David Waldstreicher (2017)

Many Americans felt similarly to John Quincy Adams: that the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both on the 50^th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, were “visible and palpable marks of divine favour” on the United States.

Many of my readers will know that Jefferson had died at 12:50 pm, and that John Adams—who had reconciled with his longtime friend turned political rival the decade before—passed away later in the afternoon, unaware of what had happened in Virginia, with the words, “Jefferson still survives.”

Fewer people will know that, because of the still-slow state of overland communication in those days, John Quincy Adams, in Washington, was unaware of Jefferson’s death in Charlottesville 117 miles away. And it would not be for another three days when John Quincy learned of his father’s death at the family home in Massachusetts, 447 miles away.

When John Quincy Adams passed 22 years later, the news spread far more quickly, because the first links between major Eastern cities had been established for the telegraph, which Samuel Morse had publicly demonstrated in 1844. (See this 1999 C-Span clip for how the new invention was used so dramatically for what became a true “media event.”)

The younger Adams—who, like his father (and unlike Jefferson), was turned out of the White House after one miserable term—did indeed, as he hoped, “live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came.” As the last prominent living link to the American Revolution, he lent tremendous prestige to the antislavery cause.

He was, in fact, engaged in another front in his struggle against slavery—a House of Representatives vote related to the Mexican War—when he was felled by a fatal stroke. 

By this time, this former President, after a long public career marked by controversy, was hailed as “Old Man Eloquent” by admirers and even recognized by opponents as a debater and legislator of formidable passion and shrewdness.

In its way, his last words were as memorable as those of his revered father: “This is the last of earth, but I am composed."

(The image accompanying this post is a detail from John Trumbull's 1818 painting of the Committee of Five presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. From left to right, the figures are: John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.)