XVIII.—THE LAST DAY OF JEFFERSON AND ADAMS.
Fifty years passed away: the Fourth of July, 1776 had been made
Immortal by its Declaration; the Fourth of July, 1826 was to be forever
rendered a Holy Day by the hand of Death.
On that serene morning, the sun rose beautifully upon the world, shining
upon the great brotherhood of States, extending from the wilds of Maine
to the Gulf of Mexico, with the Atlantic glittering like a belt of waves and
beams along its eastern shore, the Mississippi winding four thousand miles
through its western border, while ruggedly sublime, the Alleghanies towered
in the centre of the land.
The same sun, fifty years before, and lighted up with its smile of good
omen, a little nation of Thirteen provinces, nestling between the Alleghanies
and the Atlantic, and fighting even for that space, bounded by mountains
and waves, with the greatest and bloodiest power in the world.
The battle of eight years had been fought; England foiled in the Revolution,
had been humbled in the dust again; fifty years had passed away;
the thirteen Provinces of this bloody Monarchy, had swelled into Twenty-Four
States of a Free People. The banner that had waved so gloriously in
the Revolution, unveiling its Thirteen stars to the blood-red glare of battle,
now fluttering in the summer morning air, from Home and Church and
Council Hall, flashed from its folds the blaze of Twenty-Four stars, joined
in one Sun of Hope and Promise.
The wild Eagle, who had swooped so fiercely on the British host, some
fifty years ago, now sat calmly on his mountain crag, surveying his Banner,
crimsoned with the light of victory, while the peaceful land, beautiful with
river and valley, blossomed on every side.
It was the Fourth of July, 1826. From little villages, came joyous bands,
—white-robed virgins and sinless children—scattering flowers by the way;
in the deep forests, the voice of praise and prayer arose to God; from the
Pulpit the preacher spoke; beside the old cannon, which had blazed at
Germantown, stood the veteran of the Revolution, as battered as the cannon
which he fired; in the wide cities ten thousand hearts throbbed with one
common joy: and the flowers that were scattered by the way, the words
that the Preacher spoke, and the hymn that the forest echoes sent to
Heaven, the blaze of the cannon and the joy of the wide city, all had one
meaning: “This land that was once the Province of a King, is now
the Homestead of a People!”
And yet, even while the hearts of fourteen million people palpitated with
the same joy, there came an unseen and shadowy Messenger, who touched
two brave hearts with his hand, and froze them into clay.
Even while the Jubilee of Freedom rung its hosannas from every wood
and hill, Death was in the land. Silently, with that step that never makes
a sound, with that voice which speaks the language of eternity—and which
we never hear translated until we die—Death glided into the chambers of
two heroes, and bade them Home to God!
Almost at the same moment, almost within the compass of the same hour,
two hearts—that once warmed with the passion of freedom, the frenzy of
eloquence—were stopped in their beatings forever.
We will go to the room of old age, we will stand beside the bed of death,
we will see the sunbeams of July the Fourth, 1826, playing over the clammy
brows of the Brother Heroes.
The First Home!
Does it not look beautiful, the very picture of rustic comfort and unpretending
wealth, as it rises yonder on the soil of Massachusetts, the land of
Hancock and Warren, that mansion with many windows, a porch extending
along its front, fair flowers and richly foliaged trees blooming from its hall-door
to the roadside gate? The hour is very still. It is near high noon.
You can see the roof, with corniced eaves and balustraded summit marked
boldly out, against the deep blue summer sky.
While the thunder of cannon is in our ears, we will pass the gate, enter
the hall-door, and glide softly up the stairs. Softly, for death is here, in this
Home of Quincy.
With heads bowed low and stealthy tread, we enter the darkened room.
The sound of gasping breath, the sob of manhood in its agony, the wail of
women, the music of the summer air among the leaves, all at once rush on
our ears.
We enter—and gaze—and start back, awed and dumb.
All the windows of this room, save one, are dark. Yonder to the east,
you see that window, its white curtains flung aside, the perfume of the
garden and the joy of the sunshine gushing through its aperture, into the
shadowy Death-Chamber.
Yonder on the thickly curtained bed, an old man is dying.
Resting against the pillow, his shrunken form lost in the folds of the
silken coverlet, he awaits the hour of his summons, while the softened sunlight
plays gently on his brow and the summer breeze plays with his hair.
That brow is withered into wrinkles, and moistened by the death-sweat,
yet as you gaze it lights up with the fire of fifty years ago, and the lips
move and the unclosed eye blazes as though the heart of the Hero was
back again with the Immortal band of Signers.
It is stout-hearted John Adams, sinking calmly into the surges of death.
Every moment the waves come higher; the ice of the grave comes slowly
through the congealing veins, up the withered limbs; the mist of death
gathers about the old man's eyes.
At this moment, while all is still, let us from the crowd of mute spectators,
select a single form. Beside the death pillow, on which his right hand
rests, gazing in his father's face, his own noble brow bathed in a solitary
gleam of the sun, he stands, the Son, the Statesman and President.
Fifty years ago, his father, in the State House of Philadelphia, uttered
words that became History as they rung from his indignant lips, and now
wielding the Presidential Sceptre, which his father received from the hand
of Washington, the Son of the Hero gazes with unspeakable emotion, in the
face of the dying old man.
Again our eyes wander from the faces of the encircling spectators, to the
visage of the departing hero. So withered in the brow, so ghastly pale, so
quivering in the lips, so sunken in the cheeks, and yet for all, it shines as
with the last ray of its closing hour!
Hark! The thunder of cannon, softened by distance, comes through the
window. The old man hears it; at once, his eye fires, he trembles up in
the bed, and gazes toward the light.
“It is —” his dying voice rings with the fire of fifty years ago—“It is
the Fourth of July!”
That old man, sitting erect in his death-couch, his ghastly face quivering
into youth again, may well furnish a picture for the painter's art. Gaze
upon him in this hour of his weakness, when with his fingers blue with the
death-chill and his brow oozing with the death-sweat, he starts up, and
knows the voice of the cannon, and answers its message—“It is, it is the
Fourth of July!” Gaze upon that wreck of a body, now quivering with
the soul about to leave it forever, quivering and glowing into youth again,
and tell me, if you can the soul is not immortal?
It was a sight too holy for tears! The spectators—man and woman and
child,—feel their hearts hushed with one common feeling, admiration
mingled with awe. The son winds his arm about his Father's neck, and
whispers, “Fifty years to-day, you signed the Declaration, which made us
Free!”
How the Memory of the old time rushes upon the old man's heart!
Fifty years ago—the Hall thronged with the Signers—the speech that rung
from his lips, when his Country's destiny hung palpitating on his words—
the eloquence of his compatriots, Jefferson standing in the foreground of a
group of heroes, Hancock smiling serenely over the crowd, in front of the
old State House hall—it rushed upon his soul, that glorious memory, and
made him live again, with the men of '76.
Higher rose the waves of death! Higher mounted the ice of the grave!
Bluer the fingers, damper the brow, hollow and faint the rattling voice!
The old man sank slowly back on the bed, while the arm of his son, the
President, was about his neck. His eyes were closed, his hands placed on
his breast. He was sliding gently, almost imperceptibly into Death. The
belt of sunlight that poured through the window over the floor, moved along
the carpet like the shadow of a dial shortened, and was gone. Still he
lived: still a faint fluttering of the shrunken chest, showed that the soul
was not yet gone home.
It would have made you grow in love with death, to see how calmly he
died. Just as the shadows of the trees were cast far over the meadow by
the declining sun, just as the shout of the People, the thunder of cannon,
the tone of the orator came softened on the breeze, the old man raised his
head, unclosed his eyes—
“Jefferson yet survives!” he said, and the wave of Death reached his
lips, and he breathed no more.
It was four o'clock on the afternoon of July 4th, 1826, when John Adams
closed his life of glorious deeds.
“Jefferson yet survives!”
While the words of the venerable Adams yet linger in our ears, let us
hasten away to the Second Home, where Death has crossed the threshhold.
Emerging from the shadows of this beautiful valley of Virginia, we ascend
a slight elevation, and by the light of the morning sun, behold a strange
structure, standing amid a grove of forest trees. But one story in heighth,
with elegant pillars in front, and a dome rising above its roof, it strikes you
with its singular, almost oriental style of Architecture, and yet seems the
appropriate Hermitage of Philosophy and Thought.
That structure, relieved by the background of towering trees, is the Home
of a Hero. Beneath that Grecian portico, the Poets, Artists and Philosophers
of the old world have often passed, eager to behold the Statesman of
the New World, the author of the Declaration of Independence.
It is noonday now; the summer sun streams warmly on yonder dome;
the leaves are scarcely stirred into motion by the faintest breath of air.
Uncovering our heads, we will prepare to look upon Death, and with our
hearts subdued in awe, we will enter Monticello.
There is a group around the death-bed in yonder room. Every eye is
centred on the visage of a dying man; the beautiful woman, whom you
behold standing near his pillow, her eyes eloquent with emotion, is his
beloved child.
As he rests before us, on the bed of death, the centre of the silent group,
we will approach and look upon him. A man of tall and muscular frame;
his face denoting in every marked feature, the power of a bold and fearless
intellect, his lip compressed with stern determination, his blue eye flashing
with the light of a soul, born to sway the masses of men, by the magic of
Thought.
As we approach, he looks up into the face of the beautiful woman, and
utters these memorable words:
“Let no inscription be placed upon my tomb but this: Here rests
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence,
and the Friend of Religious Freedom.”
As he speaks, he describes a faint gesture, with his withered right hand.
That hand, fifty years ago, wrote the Declaration of Independence. It is
feeble and withered now; time was, when it wrote certain words that sank
into the heart of universal man, and struck the shackles from ten thousand
hearts.
Against the frauds practised by priests and kings from immortal time—
against the tricks of courtiers, the malice of bigots, the falsehoods of time-servers
who are paid to be religious, hired to be great—against all manner of
barbarity, whether done by a New Zealand cannibal, who eats the wretch
whom he has butchered, or the Spanish Inquisition, which after burning its
victims, consigns them pleasantly to an eternal torture after death, or by
John Calvin, who calmly beheld the skull of an unoffending man crumble
into ashes, and then wiped his bloody hands and praised his God, that he
was such a holy man—against all wrong, worked by the infamous or the
weak upon Man the child of Divinity, was directed the eloquence of his
Pen. The hand that once wielded that pen of power, is now chilled with
the damps of death!
As we stand gazing upon the dying man—held enchained by the majesty
of that intellect, which glows brightly over the ashy face, and flashes vividly
in the clear blue eye—the beautiful woman takes the icy hands within her
own, and kisses the cold brow.
The hand of Death is on him now.
“Thank God that I have lived to see this glorious day!” he utters in a
firm voice; and then raising his glazing eyes, he gazes in his daughter's
face, while the death-rattle writes in his throat—“Nunc dimmitis domine!”
were the last words of Thomas Jefferson.
At the same hour of noon, when the fervid sun poured straight down on
the dome of his hermitage, when not a breath of air ruffled the leaf or
stream, when in the midst of a weeping throng, stood his beloved daughter,
placing her soft fingers on his glassy eyeballs, pressing her warm mouth to
his cold lips, died Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence.
He died some four hours before Adams surrendered his soul. When the
Patriot of Quincy gasped “Jefferson still survives,” the soul of Jefferson
was already before his God.
It would have been deemed a wonderful thing, had either of these men
died on the Fourth of July, just half a century after the day of 1776.
But that the Brothers in the work of freedom, the master spirits of the
Council, who stirred up men's hearts with godlike impulses, and moved
their arms in glorious deeds, in the dark hour of Revolution, should have
died not only on the Fourth of July, but on the same day, within a few
hours of each other, while bodily separated by hundreds of miles, their souls
borne to Heaven by the hymns of a People, freed by their labors, looks to
me as though Almighty God had sent his Messenger and called his Servants
home, thus sanctifying by this two-fold death, the Fourth of July forevermore.
They met before the Throne of God, and stood, solemn and awful, amid
the throng of heroes clustered there.
Compare the death-beds of these men, with the closing hour of their
compeer in the work of freedom, Thomas Paine! They surrounded by
friends, who smiled fondly on their glazing eyes; encircled by beautiful
women, who pressed their warm hands to the icy brow, and kissed the
freezing lips: He, utterly desolate and alone, with no friend, save one aged
Quaker; no hope, save that which dropped from the envenomed tongues
of the Pharisees, who came to feast their eyes with his death struggles, even
as savages amuse their idle hours by torturing the wretch whom they purpose
to burn to death.
Pity Thomas Paine, my friends, and ask yourselves the question—“Tried
by the same kind of justice, that has darkened his errors into sins worse
than murder or incest, and converted his heroic virtues into crimes, what
would become of Jefferson and Adams?”
Imagine the biography of Jefferson and Adams, written by one of those
ignoble wretches, who heaped their slanders on the grave of Thomas Paine!
I stand upon the grave of this deeply wronged hero, and ask my countrymen
to do him justice! I admit his errors, and pity them, for the sake of
his substantial virtues. I boldly point to the records of the past for proof,
when I state, that Thomas Paine was the co-worker of Jefferson and Adams,
in the great deed of Independence. My voice may fall unheeded now, but
one hundred years hence, the name of the Infidel will be forgotten in the
glory of the Patriot, Thomas Paine.
