Homes of American Statesmen; With Anecdotical, Personal, and Descriptive Sketches

Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave;
Of Fancy, Reason, Virtue, nought can me bereave."

He did not much admire the poetry of Byron. One objection which he is recollected to have made to the poet was the use of the word "rot." There is some peculiarity in Byron in this respect; thus in Childe Harold: —

"The Bucentaur lies rotting unrestored,
Where meaner relics must not dare to rot."

This, if a sound objection, which it is not, was narrow for so great a man. The cause of this distaste lay deeper. Mr. Adams, though a dear lover of Shakspeare, was of the Johnsonian school of writers. His diction is elaborate, stately, and in his earlier writings verbose, but always polished, harmonious, and sustained. He liked unconsciously Latin English better than Anglo-Saxon. Byron, in common with a large and increasing class of moderns, loved to borrow the force of familiar and every-day language, and to lend to it the dignity and beauty of deep thought and high poetic fancy. Not improbably, the moral obliquities of the poet had their influence in qualifying the opinion formed of his writings, by a man of such strict rectitude as Mr. Adams.

He was fond of Watts's Psalms and Hymns, and repeated them often, sometimes rising from his seat in the exaltation of his feelings. Among favorite stanzas was this one:

Sweet fields, beyond the swelling flood,
Stand dressed in living green;
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.

Until his private letters shall be published, no adequate conception can be formed of the devotion he paid to his mother. This may give an inkling of it. A young friend inquired of him, when he was once at Hingham on their annual fishing party in his honor, in which of his poems a certain line was to be found, viz. —

"Hull – but that name's redeemed upon the wave,"

referring to the surrender of General Hull, so soon followed (only three days after, August 16-19, 1812) by the capture of the Guerriere by Captain Hull. "I do not," he replied, "but I have been often struck by the coincidence. I think, however, the line occurs in a poem addressed to my mother."

The best saying of Mr. Adams was in reply to the inquiry, What are the recognized principles of politics?

Mr. Adams. There are none. There are recognized precepts, but they are bad, and so not principles.

But is not this a sound one, "The greatest good of the greatest number?"

Mr. Adams. No, that is the worst of all, for it looks specious, while it is ruinous; for what is to become of the minority? This is the only principle – The greatest good of all.

It must be admitted that much tyranny lurks in this favorite democratic tenet, not half as democratic, however, as Mr. Adams's amendment. Wrongs and outrages the most unmerciful, have been committed by majorities. It may even happen where the forms of law are maintained; but what shall be said when the majority resolves itself into a mob? When rivers of innocent blood may (as they have) run from city gates. The tyranny of majorities is irresponsible, without redress, and without punishment, except in the ultimate iron grasp of "the higher law."

Mr. Adams's view, so much larger than the common one, may, with a strong probability, be traced to the mother. In her letters to him, she insists again and again upon the duty of universal kindness and benevolence. Patriot as she was, she pitied the Refugees. She said to him,

"Man is bound to the performance of certain duties, all which tend to the happiness and welfare of society, and are comprised in one short sentence expressive of universal benevolence: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'

"Remember more, the Universal Cause
Acts not by partial, but by general laws;
And makes what happiness we justly call,
Subsist, not in the good of one, but ALL.'"

In other letters she illustrated observations in the same spirit by these quotations:

"Shall I determine where his frowns shall fall,
And fence my grotto from the lot of ALL?"

"Prompt at every call,
Can watch and weep and pray and feel for ALL.

One evening, at his house in F street in Washington, he spoke of Judge Parsons, of his depth and subtlety, and the conciseness of his language. "Soon after I entered his office he said to us students – 'Lord Bacon observes that "reading makes a full man, conversation a ready man, writing a correct man." Young gentlemen, my advice to you is, that you study to be full, ready and correct.' I thought," said Mr. Adams, "that I never heard good advice so well conveyed."

He was asked by the writer whether he had ever received any acknowledgment of his services, any mark of gratitude from the colored people of the District? "None," said he – "except that I now and then hear, in a low tone, a hearty God bless you! That is enough."

It was enough; enough for recompense and for justification, since we are in the sad pass that justification is needed – since

"Virtue itself of Vice must pardon beg,

And pray for leave to do him good."

So then, in this Republic there are millions of human hearts, which are not permitted to love a benefactor, and dare not utter for him an invocation, kindred to their devotion to God, except "in a low tone!"

When in 1846 Mr. Adams was struck the first time with palsy, he was visited by Charles Sumner, who sat much by his bedside. As he became better, he said one day to his visitor: "You will enter public life; you do not want it, but you will be drawn into the current, in spite of yourself. Now I have a word of advice to give you. Never accept a present. While I was in Russia, the Minister of the Interior, an old man, whose conscience became more active as his bodily powers failed, grew uneasy on account of the presents he had received. He calculated the value of them, and paid it all over to the Imperial treasury. This put me to thinking upon the subject, and I then made a resolution never to accept a present while I remained in the public service; and I never have, unless it was some trifling token, as a hat or cane."

A neighboring clergyman, to whom this conversation was related, exclaimed – "A hat! That cannot be, for he never had any but an old one." It was a tradition in Cambridge that Mr. Adams, while Professor in the University, was noted for indifference to personal appearance, and his well-worn hat was particularly remembered.

In the relation of husband Mr. Adams showed the same fidelity and devotedness which characterized him in every other. He was united to a woman whose virtues and accomplishments blessed and adorned his home. In a letter written shortly after his noble vindication of the character of woman, and the propriety and utility of their intervention in public affairs, he said:

"Had I not, by the dispensation of Providence, been blessed beyond the ordinary lot of humanity in all the domestic relations of life, as a son, a brother, and a husband, I should still have thought myself bound to vindicate the social rights and the personal honor of the petitioners, who had confided to me the honorable trust of presenting the expression of their wishes to the legislative councils of the nation. But that this sense of imperious duty was quickened within my bosom by the affectionate estimate of the female character impressed upon my heart and mind by the virtues of the individual woman, with whom it has been my lot to pass in these intimate relations my days upon earth, I have no doubt."

In 1840 he had a severe fall, striking his head against the corner of an iron rail, which inflicted a heavy contusion on his forehead, and rendered him for some time insensible. His left shoulder was likewise dislocated. This occurred at the House of Representatives after adjournment. Fortunately several members were within call, and gave him the most tender and assiduous assistance. He was carried to the lodgings of one of them, and a physician called. With the united strength of four men, it took more than an hour to reduce the dislocation. "Still," says a witness of the scene, "Mr. Adams uttered not a murmur, though the great drops of sweat which rolled down his furrowed cheeks, or stood upon his brow, told but too well the agony he suffered." At his request he was immediately conveyed to his house; and the next morning, to the astonishment of every one, he was found in his seat as usual. He was accustomed to be the first to enter the House and the last to leave it. Mr. Everett tells us that he had his seat by the side of the veteran, and that he should not have been more surprised to miss one of the marble pillars from the hall than Mr. Adams.

That this painful accident did not impair the vigor of his mind is evident from the fact that he subsequently argued the Amistad case, and sustained the fierce contest of three days on the expulsion resolution in the House. It was three years later also that he made the journey for the benefit of his health, which turned out an improvised and continuous ovation. He had designed merely to visit Lebanon Springs. He was so much pleased with his journey thus far into the State of New-York, that he concluded to prolong it to Quebec, Montreal, and Niagara Falls, and return to Massachusetts through the length of the empire State. This return was signalized by attentions and homage on the part of the people so spontaneous and unanimous, that nothing which has occurred since the progress of La Fayette, has equalled it. "Public greetings, processions, celebrations, met and accompanied every step of his journey." Addresses by eminent men, and acclamations of men, women, and children, who thronged the way, bore witness of the deep hold which the man, without accessories of office and pageantry of state, had of their hearts. Of this excursion he said himself towards the close of it, "I have not come alone, the whole people of the State of New-York have been my companions." In the autumn of the same year he went to Cincinnati to assist in laying the foundation of an observatory. This journey was attended by similar demonstrations. At a cordial greeting given him at Maysville, Kentucky, after an emphatic testimony to the integrity of Mr. Clay, he made that renewed and solemn denial of the charges of "bargain and corruption."

He suffered a stroke of paralysis in November, 1846, but recovered, and took his seat at the ensuing session of Congress. He regarded this as equivalent to a final summons, and made no subsequent entry in his faithful diary except under the title of "posthumous." After this he spoke little in the House.

In November, 1847, he left his home in Quincy for the last time. On the twentieth of February he passed his last evening at his house in Washington. He retired to his library at nine o'clock, where his wife read to him a sermon by Bishop Wilberforce on Time. The next morning he rose early and occupied himself with his pen as he was wont. With more than usual spryness and alacrity he ascended the stairs of the Capitol. In the House a resolution for awarding thanks and gold medals to several officers concerned in the Mexican war was taken up. Mr. Adams uttered his emphatic No! on two or three preliminary questions. When the final question was about to be put, and while he was in the act of rising, as it was supposed, to address the House, he sunk down. He was borne to the speaker's room. He revived so far as to inquire for his wife, who was present. He seemed desirous of uttering thanks. The only distinct words he articulated were, "This is the end of earth. I am content." He lingered until the evening of the twenty-third, and then expired.

Thus he fell at his post in the eighty-first year of his age, the age of Plato. With the exception of Phocion there is no active public life continued on the great arena, with equal vigor and usefulness, to so advanced an age. Lord Mansfield retired at eighty-three; but the quiet routine of a judicial station is not as trying as the varied and boisterous contentions of a political and legislative assembly. Ripe as he was for heaven; he was still greatly needed upon earth. His services would have been of inestimable importance in disposing of the perilous questions, not yet definitively settled, which arose out of unhallowed war and conquest.

There is not much satisfaction in dwelling upon the general effusions of eloquence, or the pageantry which ensued. A single glance of guileless love from the men, women and children, who came forth from their smiling villages to greet the virtuous old statesman in his unpretending journeys, was worth the whole of it. The hearty tribute of Mr. Benton, so long a denouncer, has an exceptional value, the greater because he had made honorable amends to the departed during his life. That he was sincerely and deeply mourned by the nation, it would be a libel on the nation to doubt. His remains rested appropriately in Independence and Faneuil Halls on the way to their final resting place, the tomb he had made for those of his venerated parents. There he was laid by his neighbors and townsmen, sorrowing for the friend and the MAN. His monument is to stand on the other side of the pulpit.

Happy place which hallows such memories, and holds up such EXAMPLES.

JACKSON

The events of Jackson's life, even in their chronological order, dispose themselves into a number of combinations, which a skilful pen, guided by the hand of a poet, might easily work up into a series of impressive and contrasted pictures. We have not the ability, had we the space here, to undertake this labor, but we see no reason why we should not present some outlines of it, for the benefit of future more competent artists.

In such a series, we should first see the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed son of Irish emigrants, driven from their home by a sense of British oppression, opening his young eyes in South Carolina, amid the stormy scenes of our Revolution. Around him, his friends and neighbors are training for the battle, and preparing to defend their homes from an invading foe; his eldest brother Hugh, is brought back dead from the fatigues of active service; the old Waxhaw meeting-house, a temporary hospital, through which he wanders, is crowded with the wounded and dying, whose condition moves him to tears, and fills him with melancholy impressions of the horrors of war, coupled with a deepening sense of English cruelty and oppression, of which he had before heard in the tales of his mother and her kindred about the old country from which they had fled; while, finally, he himself, but little more than thirteen years of age, in company with a brother Robert, takes up arms, is made a prisoner, suffers severely from wounds and the smallpox of the jail, loses first his brother by that disease, and then his mother by a fever caught on board a prison-ship, whither she had gone to nurse some captive friends, and is thus left alone in the world, the only one of all his family spared by the enemy.

We should next see the friendless, portionless orphan wending his solitary way through the immense forests of the Far West, (now the State of Tennessee), where the settlements were hundreds of miles from each other, while every tree and rock sheltered an enemy in the shape of some grisly animal, or the person of a more savage Indian. But he succeeds in crossing the mountains, he reaches the infant villages on the Cumberland River, he studies and practises the rude law of those distant regions, takes part in all the wild vicissitudes of frontier life, repels the red man, fights duels with the white, encounters in deadly feuds the turbulent spirits of a half-barbarous society, administers justice in almost extemporized courts, helps to frame a regular State constitution, marries a wife as chivalric, noble, and fearless as himself, and at last, when society is reduced to some order, is chosen a representative of the backwoods in the Congress at Washington.

Arrived at the seat of government, a tall, thin, uncouth figure, with no words to express himself in, and apparently without ambition, – he yet shows himself, with all his wild western coarseness, a man of insight and decision. He made no speeches, he drew up no reports, he created no sensation in the committee-room, or the lobbies, – he was not at all known, as a leader or a prominent individual, but he was one of the twelve democrats of the House, who dared to oppose returning an answer to Washington's last address, when the fame and the personal influence of that exalted man were almost omnipotent. He doubtless estimated the services and the character of Washington as highly as any member, but the measures of the administration his judgment did not approve, and he voted as he thought – a silent uncultivated representative, – odd in his dress and look, but with grit in him, not appalled even by the stupendous greatness of Washington! On the other hand, he saw in Jefferson a man for the times; became his friend, voted for him, and helped his State to vote for him as the second President.

In the next phases of his life we discover Jackson, as the dignified and impartial judge, asserting the law in the face of a powerful combination of interested opponents; as the retired and prosperous planter, gathering together a large estate, which he surrounds with the comforts and luxuries of a refined existence, but sells at once when a friend's misfortunes involves him in debt, and retires to a primitive log cabin to commence his fortunes once more; as an Indian fighter achieving amid hardships of all kinds – the want of funds, the inclemency of the season, the ravages of disease, the unskilfulness of superiors, the insubordination of troops – a series of brilliant victories that made his name a terror to the Creeks and all their confederates. His campaign in the Floridas broke the power of the Indians, secretly in league with the British, forced them into a treaty, and wrested Pensacola from the possession of the Spanish governor, who had basely violated his neutrality, and who, when he wished to negotiate, was answered by Jackson, "My diplomacy is in the mouths of my cannon."

But a different foe and a wider theatre awaited the display of his military genius at New Orleans. Worn down with sickness and exhaustion, with raw and undisciplined troops – many of them the mere rabble of the wharves, and some of them buccaneers from neighboring islands – scantily supplied with arms and ammunition, in the midst of a mixed population of different tongues, where attachment to his cause was doubtful, continually agitated by gloomy forebodings of the result, though outwardly serene, he was surrounded by the flower of the British army, led by its most brave and accomplished generals. The attack commenced: from his breastwork of cotton bales his unerring rifles poured a continuous flame of fire. The enemy quailed: its leaders were killed or wounded; and the greatest victory of the war crowned the exertions of Jackson as the greatest military genius of his time. A universal glow of joy and gratitude spread from the liberated city over the whole land; Te deums were sung in the churches; children robed in white strewed his way with flowers; the nation jubilantly uttered its admiration and gratitude. It was thus the desolated orphan of the Carolinas avenged the wrongs of his family, and asserted the rights of his country, to the lasting dishonor of Great Britain.

Years pass on, and we see the successful General the President of the People, engaged once more in a fearful struggle; this time not against a foreign foe, but with an internal enemy of vast power and tremendous means of mischief. He is fighting the monster bank – another St. George gallantly charging another dragon – and, as usual, comes out of the contest victorious. The innumerable army of money-changers, wielding a power as formidable, though unseen, as that of an absolute monarch, is routed amid a horrible clangor of metal and rancorous hisses. The great true man, sustained by an honest people, was greater than the power of money. He wrought the salvation of his country from a hideous corruption – from bankruptcy, disgrace, and long years of political subjection. His near posterity has recognized the service, and placed him among the most illustrious of statesmen.