Ecstatic Nation Read online

  DEDICATION

  TO MICHAEL DELLAIRA

  EPIGRAPH

  The Heart is the Capital of the Mind

  The Mind is a single State—

  The Heart and Mind together make

  A single Continent—

  One—is the Population—

  Numerous enough—

  This ecstatic Nation

  Seek—it is Yourself.

  —EMILY DICKINSON, CIRCA 1875

  Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial, through which we pass, will light us down, to the latest generation.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1862

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The End of Earth

  PART ONE (1848–1861)

  ( 1 ) Higher Laws

  ( 2 ) Who Ain’t a Slave?

  ( 3 ) One Aggresses

  ( 4 ) Democracy

  ( 5 ) Sovereignty

  ( 6 ) Revolutions Never Go Backward

  ( 7 ) The Impending Crisis

  ( 8 ) A Clank of Metal

  PART TWO (1861–1865)

  ( 9 ) On to Richmond

  ( 10 ) Battle Cry of Freedom

  ( 11 ) This Thing Now Never Seems to Stop

  ( 12 ) The Last Full Measure of Devotion

  ( 13 ) Fairly Won

  ( 14 ) Armed Liberty

  ( 15 ) And This Is Richmond

  ( 16 ) The Simple, Fierce Deed

  PART THREE (1865–1876)

  ( 17 ) But Half Accomplished

  ( 18 ) Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum

  ( 19 ) Power

  ( 20 ) Deep Water

  ( 21 ) Running from the Past

  ( 22 ) Westward the Course of Empire

  ( 23 ) With the Ten Commandments in One Hand

  ( 24 ) Conciliation; or, the Living

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Brenda Wineapple

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE: THE END OF EARTH

  They called him Old Man Eloquent, but he was more than that, more than eloquent; he was resolute, canny, cantankerous. And though he liked to quote the Bible and Shakespeare and to frame an irrefutable argument, he could also be eloquently brusque. In fact, he had just uttered one unwavering word that day in the House. No, he had said, and “no” summarized how John Quincy Adams had spent his long life—and where, in a sense, his country was heading: to a series of negatives, for good and for ill, that brooked no compromise or conversation.

  No: “No is the wildest word we consign to the language,” as Emily Dickinson would say. The sixth president of the United States, eighty-one years old and a crusty member of the House of Representatives, had spoken loud and clear. It was the early afternoon on Monday, February 21, 1848. With his bald head fringed with a crown of white hair and a permanent scowl carved deep into his broad face, Adams struck his colleagues as the same as ever—hale, hearty, forthright—despite of course the minor stroke he had suffered not too long ago. Yet he still could pursue an objective with unrelenting, single-minded focus. His grandson Henry Adams long remembered the summer day when he had been about six or seven and had rebelled against going to school until his grandfather, having emerged from his study, appeared at the top of the steps, descended the stairs, put on his hat, took the boy’s hand, and silently walked Henry the mile or so to the schoolhouse, whereupon Henry took his seat and his grandfather let go his hand and returned home, never having said a word.

  A New England Puritan who loved scribbling in his colossal diary and arguing on behalf of his country, John Quincy Adams was never eclipsed by his own brass or mahogany, as another outspoken man, the radical Reverend Theodore Parker, would say. Known as wild or, at best, contentious in his views, according to Parker, he had encountered more political opposition than any other man in the nation. Persistently, he had battled for public education, improved transportation, civil rights, freedom of expression—and against the extension of slavery. Morally austere, without humor, glacially scrupulous, the bleak Old Man frequently reread his Cicero, and just the day before, he had twice attended church. In the evening he had read a sermon by the Reverend William Wilberforce, the British antislavery evangelical, for pleasure. It was about the passing of time.

  The Old Man’s habits had been unchanged for years. On Monday morning Adams woke early and rode by carriage from his home on F Street to the House of Representatives, where he represented Massachusetts, his cherished state. He adored Washington too, that rough and ready town—the city of magnificent intentions, Charles Dickens had called it—and a work in progress to which Adams was devoted. Mud might clog the streets, if that’s what you could call those unpaved passageways and lanes, pigs rooted for garbage, and summers were unbearable, what with the brackish swamps breeding disease and the city reeking with the bittersweet smell of horse manure. Neither the Washington Monument nor the Capitol was finished; they stood undressed, symbolic of the city and country that were to come. “Public buildings that need but a public to complete,” Dickens observed.

  It was winter now, crisp and clear and not at all malarial or murky. At the House, Adams chatted with a few colleagues, nothing more. In the early afternoon, Speaker of the House Robert C. Winthrop (a friend) called the question of whether or not to suspend the rules in order to vote to award gold medals to various generals for their gallant action in what Adams, unequivocally, considered an “unrighteous” war—the war with Mexico. So Adams said no.

  His face reddened. He had evidently muttered something else, too. “Look to Mr. Adams! Look to Mr. Adams!” several representatives cried. Adams grabbed for the corner of his desk and then slumped to the left of his chair. David Fisher of Ohio, seated next to him, caught Adams in his arms, and another quick-acting colleague ran for ice water and a compress.

  “Mr. Adams is dying!” House members rushed forward to lift the elderly statesman to the space in front of the clerk’s table before several others brought in a sofa. Carefully lifted onto it, Adams was carried into the Rotunda. Winthrop adjourned the session.

  As the members of the House dashed here and there, several senators, on hearing that Adams was stricken, thronged around the old man. So too did anxious visitors to the House, who had come to witness the day’s roll calls. They had not expected this. The thickening crowd prompted one of the House members to recommend that the sofa be removed to the East Portico, which might be better for the ex-president because a fresh east wind was blowing there. The physicians who were members of the House thought the place too damp. Winthrop suggested they go to the speaker’s room, where they would have more privacy. They bled Adams and applied mustard plasters, which seemed to give the poor man some relief even though his entire right side was paralyzed.

  Adams asked for Henry Clay, who had been his secretary of state. Old Harry had also helped engineer what was known as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (admitting Maine to the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state while pledging that the territory north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes latitude, would be forever free). Like Adams, Clay had run for president more than once and as recently as four years ago. He dashed out of the Senate chamber, tears streaming down his face.

  “This is the end of earth,” Adams was heard to say. “But I am composed.”

  Louisa Adams hurried in to see her husband, who by that time could not recognize her. Distraught, she left the room. Joshua Giddings, the passionate antislavery representative from Ohio, felt Adams’s pulse and wiped the sweat from his brow.

  All business in the hushed Capitol was suspended through the ne
xt day and the next day and the next. The celebration of Washington’s birthday was canceled. On the evening of February 23, 1848, after sixty years of public service, John Quincy died as he lay, fittingly, in the Capitol building. The electric telegraph madly tapped out the news.

  NEWSPAPERS THROUGHOUT THE country chronicled the funeral’s every detail. The Stars and Stripes flew at half-mast while statesmen from the South as well as the North paid homage to the tough old contrarian as he lay in his glass-covered coffin in the House of Representatives. Thousands of people filed by, even those who had hated him during his long years as their public servant.

  Had he died much earlier, Old Man Eloquent would not have been remembered with the outpourings of love and praise that accompanied his funeral train all the way to his ancestral home in Quincy, Massachusetts. For whatever his failures as president, whatever his want of judgment, whatever his intransigence, this was the man who had subsequently fought with all his might for the right of free speech when the House of Representatives passed a series of “gag rules” tabling all petitions or propositions related to slavery and its abolition. This was the man who had tried to establish relations with the independent state of Haiti and who, in 1841, when he was seventy-three, had successfully argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court on behalf of freedom for a boatload of black men kidnapped from their African homes to be sold into slavery in Cuba. This was the man once called the Madman of Massachusetts whom irate representatives from the South had unsuccessfully tried to censure; this was the man who had hunkered down and won, over sectional dissensions, the right of slaves to petition Congress. This was the son of a president and a president himself, who, after he left the executive office, had broadened. He had possessed a capacity for growth, and he had loved a good fight, and his constituents loved him for that, all the more so after he was gone. When a motion was proposed in the House that a committee escort his body back to Massachusetts, a Southern representative objected. “What’s the use of sending him home?” he asked a fellow member. “His people think more of his corpse than they do of any man living and will reelect it, and send it back.” He put sulfuric acid, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, in his tea. And he bequeathed to his son Charles Francis Adams the words that he believed he and the country should live by: “a stout heart and a clear conscience, and never despair.”

  In the Senate, the brawny Democrat of Missouri Thomas Hart Benton, an adversary, summed up what many congressmen felt when they thought of old Adams: “Where could death have found him but at the post of duty?”

  “We cannot find it in our hearts to regret he has died as he has died,” said Speaker Winthrop. “He himself could not have desired any other end.” The tributes were warm, for he was the greatest man in the House, admitted even those who liked him least. “There have been, I confess, moments in my life—perhaps not a few,” Speaker Winthrop noted in his diary, “when John Quincy Adams has seemed to me the most credulous, prejudiced, and opinionated of mortal men. As a rule, however,” he continued, “he either endeared himself to me by his attractive conversation, or electrified me by his energy and eloquence.”

  South Carolina Representative Isaac Holmes praised his former enemy as a diplomat, statesman, peacemaker, sage, and patriot who had “crushed no heart beneath the rude grasp of proscription.” Holmes, who had wanted to eject Adams from the House, reminded the mourners that the two men, representing North and South, had “battled for a common cause, and rejoiced in common triumph”—and that in grief, they were united. Governor James McDowell of Virginia, another former foe, eulogized his colleague as “unapproachable by all others in the unity of his character and in the thousand-fold anxieties which centered upon him.” North and South could join hands. Death was their bond as it would later prove—alas—to be.

  A POIGNANT HARBINGER of the national funerals to come, the rites were undertaken with laborious and protracted solemnity. Adams lay in state for two days in a gloomy Capitol, where the portraits of Lafayette and Washington, behind the coffin, were covered with black cloth. Black cloth had also been draped over Adams’s chair, and dark funeral wreaths were placed in the windows. The coffin was decorated with evergreens.

  At dawn on Saturday, February 25, thirteen cannon ceremoniously boomed to indicate that this would be no ordinary day. Afterward, every thirty minutes, a single gun was fired. At nine, the crowd began to mill around the Capitol, and by noon, when the procession started, and the bells on Capitol Hill began to toll, the Rotunda was jammed with people. James K. Polk, the slaveholding president of the United States, trailed by his cabinet, solemnly entered the Hall in the House of Representatives. The president took his seat beside the Speaker. The Supreme Court justices, all black-robed, came next, just ahead of the foreign diplomatic corps, smartly clothed in their formal costumes, and then the officers of the army and navy, whose sparkling regalia contrasted with the dimness of the setting.

  The senators walked into the Hall followed by the self-effacing vice president, George M. Dallas, who would sit on the left of the Speaker. The members of the Adams family minus his widow, who was too grief-stricken to attend, walked ahead of the silver-mounted coffin, which came to rest in front of the speaker. There was silence.

  The Massachusetts senators, John Davis and the black-eyed orator Daniel Webster, walked into the Hall.

  The Reverend R. R. Gurley offered up a prayer and a hymn.

  The choir sang. The Reverend Gurley read from Job: “And thine age shall be clearer than the noon-day; thou shalt be as the morning; and thou shalt be secure, because there is hope.”

  After a closing hymn, a huge procession formed at the Portico and moved from the east front to the north gate and then around to the west. Thomas Hart Benton was one of the pallbearers, as was the brilliant Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina. They had been preceded by the funeral band, the chaplains, the attending physicians, and the Committee of Arrangements, which included a young Whig representative from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.

  The family followed the hearse in their carriage, and behind it came carriages packed with representatives from Massachusetts and from Congress and with President Polk. Toward the end of the procession stood officers and students from the institutions of higher learning, such as Georgetown, which Adams had long championed. Citizens and strangers came last. The military band played a dirge, their drums muffled. They passed houses and the public buildings shrouded in black cloth until they arrived at the Congressional Burying Ground, where the venerable Old Man waited patiently for his last train ride to Quincy, Massachusetts. There he would rest, near his famous mother and his famous father.

  At sunset a salute of twenty-nine guns brought the day to its end.

  WHEN THE FUNERAL cortege slowly rumbled over five hundred miles of railroad track, all along the way businesses were closed, flags were lowered, and men and women silently bowed their heads or doffed their hats. Newspapers printed eulogies, tributes, and whatever scraps of verse or wise sayings they thought might please and console the public that reverently visited the casket in city after city. In Baltimore, Adams’s coffin lay in the rotunda at the Mercantile Exchange, and in Philadelphia, it rested in Independence Hall, where Adams’s father had helped birth the country. In New York City, ten thousand citizens paid their respects at City Hall before the funeral train chugged to Springfield, Massachusetts, and then on to Boston, where thousands of local citizens, many of them holding placards, had come to bid Adams good-bye as the city’s bells tolled. At the Boston Theater, there was a special performance followed by the singing of the national anthem. For days, sorrowful citizens bought mourning badges from the more enterprising of the grievers, but a blizzard ripped through the city, canceling all outdoor events.

  A hearse drawn by six black and plumed horses delivered the mortal remains of the ex-president to storied Faneuil Hall, another symbol of American independence, where patriots, among them two Adamses, had debated liberty and freedom and unfair taxation without rep
resentation in the rooms above the marketplace. Built in 1742 and redesigned and enlarged at the turn of the nineteenth century by Charles Bulfinch, Faneuil Hall had been made into a crypt, said one reporter. The tall arched windows were now wrapped in black gauze, the American flag wrapped in black crepe, and the panels in the galleries told of Adams’s long career: private secretary to the minister to Russia; minister to the United Netherlands and then Prussia; senator in the Massachusetts legislature; senator in Congress; minister to Russia; peace negotiator and minister to Great Britain; secretary of state; president; member of the House of Representatives.

  After the eulogies and orations, many of the speechmakers trotted off to a banquet. Boston Yankees and Northern Whigs were feeling good about themselves even as they admitted that with the death of Adams they were irrevocably cut off from the past. “The last relic of our Revolutionary age has departed,” wrote the editor of the New-York Tribune. “He has been a public servant for more years than any one who survives him; and his career is of inestimable value for the striking proof it affords that a Politician need not be tricky, nor hollow, nor time-serving.”

  On March 11, from Penn’s Hill, where as a boy John Quincy Adams had watched the Battle of Bunker Hill, the sound of guns could be heard ricocheting through the countryside. Adams was being celebrated as the president and son of a president who had stood firm and unmoved during a storm. The storm was over freedom, and these days he had been thundering about slavery. That didn’t matter, not right now anyway. One Southern member of Congress who was escorting the coffin on the day of Adams’s interment walked up to the vault and, with the gentleness and gallantry of a cavalier, trembled with respect as he said, “Good-bye, Old Man!”

  This unnamed mourner must have known that in 1839 Adams had offered a doomed amendment to the Constitution declaring that from July 4, 1842, onward, there should be no hereditary slavery in the United States; that on that day and afterward, every child born in the United States should be free; and that no state should be admitted into the United States that tolerated slavery.