Prologue: The End of Earth

hey 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- m inded 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

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emerged from his study, appeared at the top of the steps, descended the stairs, put on his hat, took the boys 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 Mans 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 thats 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

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