told me Mr. Adams had addressed to a charming young lady of his acquaintance only forty-eight hours before his decease. The aged author had, as Mr. Lyons informed me, at the request of the latter, supplied him with a copy of these verses, which he seemed, and most naturally too, to prize very highly.

In my judgment, the country has produced but few men who have left behind them more multiplied evidences of elevated patriotism, of private virtue, and of varied ability and attainments than the eminent statesman of New England to whom I am now referring. This much all unprejudiced men must, I think, every where admit. I can certainly not suspect myself of being deluded by feelings either of personal partiality or identity of political opinions. I was, according to my ability, a zealous opponent of the administration of Mr. Adams while that administration was yet in progress, and it is known by my acquaintances that I was far from approv ing many of his public acts during the closing years of his life. But a laborious and dispassionate examination of the leading incidents in his long official career has effectually vanquished early prejudices, and will now enable me to speak of him, I believe, with something of the cool impartiality which the future historian may be expected to display. More than thirty years have gone by since Mr. Adams was defeated by his distinguished military rival for the first office in the gift of the American people; and it may be now safely asserted, that never since that striking period in American annals, has any citizen occupied the chair of state who, while performing the varied and complex duties of President, offered clear

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

89 er and more numerous proofs of inflexible honesty of purpose, a thorough knowledge of affairs, unremitting industry in the performance of official duty, entire exemption from mere party or personal prejudice, moderation, mingled with firmñess, in all critical emergencies, mild and unassuming urbanity both in official and social intercourse, with a vigilance that never winked, and an energy that never knew exhaustion. Mr. Adams was, perhaps, upon the whole, the most highly cultivated public man, in many respects, that our country has yet known, and it is understood that he labored strenuously to the last moment of his protracted life to increase his stores of useful knowledge. There was no department of science of which he was altogether ignorant. He had traversed the whole wide domain of general literature; his knowledge of history, both ancient and modern, was alike thorough and minute; his imagination, like that of Mr. Burke, seemed to grow more fertile, vigorous, and resplendent as he advanced in years; his memory, as well of men as of things, was such as it has been seldom given man to possess; his oratorical powers, not supposed, I have heard, to have been very remarkable in early life, were such, during the last fifteen years of his congressional existence, as compelled even his bitterest political foes to acquiesce in his claim to be recognized as "The Old Man Eloquent," and ever secured to him the unbroken and interested attention of those who hated him with an acrimony never yet surpassed, but who felt awed into unmurmuring respect under the magical influence of his unpremeditated and truly electrical utterances. That Mr. Adams was much, and unjustly, embittered toward the

South in the evening of his remarkable career, I think will hardly be now in any quarter denied. That he had some cause for alienation and for unkindness seems to me to be equally apparent. His opinions in regard to the baneful influence of African slavery, and his zealous opposition to its future extension into the vacant domain of the republic, were not less sincerely entertained than were precisely opposite views by his sectional adversaries; and perhaps his prejudices toward the South were not stronger than those of Mr. Calhoun toward the North, who, throughout his whole public career, was never known, as I have learned, to place his feet for a moment upon Northern soil; and from whose lips I heard the declaration, more than once, during the year 1848, when General Taylor and General Cass were contesting for the presidency of the Union, that he would prefer the election to that place of any respectable Southern planter whatever to any man of Northern birth and residence; though it is possible that Mr. Calhoun was, after all, not altogether so averse to his fellow-citizens of the free states as he seemed to imagine himself to be, inasmuch as I remember his declaring to me on one occasion, and about the period just referred to, that he should be quite content to see George M. Dallas elevated to the presidency, as his political opinions were known to be in the main such as Southern men were inclined to approve, and as he was not only a gentleman himself, in character, person, and demeanor, but also the son of a gentleman-he (Mr. Calhoun) having known in former days very intimately, as he said, the father of Mr. Dallas, for whom he ever cherished a very special esteem and kindness..

J. Q. ADAMS AND J. C. CALHOUN COMPARED. 91

Between John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams there were remarkable points both of resemblance and of dissimilitude. They were both men of undoubted personal integrity; alike amiable and exemplary in domestic and in social life; fervent lovers of their country, yet of decided local bias; assiduous and untiring in their application to business, and cherishing equally the strictest notions of frugality in the appropriation and expenditure of the public money. So far were both these statesmen from being personally tainted with fraud, or even suspected of a disposition to participate in corrupt bargaining and traffic in connection with concerns of government, that it may be now safely asserted that no man. who justly suspected himself of gross obliquity of purpose would have even ventured to challenge familiar intercourse with either of these sternly upright men. One of them was principally a profound logician, while the other was a spirited and powerful debater, not pre-eminently distinguished for argumentative power, nor yet, indeed, wholly deficient therein. Mr. Calhoun was profoundly metaphysical in his habits of thought, and had penetrated deeply into all the mysterious arcana connected with the fundamental principles of government; and he poured forth occasionally, in his moments of highest exertion, such a continued series of massive and strongly interlinked deductions, constantly advancing from one Alpine height of argument to another, that the mind of the ordinary hearer was often most painfully exercised in attempting to follow his giant intellectual strides, and even the reporters themselves complained that, with aching and overpowered brain, they were often compelled to re

linquish in despair the arduous and impossible task of marking down the successive steps of his Herculean progress. Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Calhoun were members of Mr. Monroe's cabinet, and are understood to have there differed, though not unkindly, upon several questions of no little magnitude and importance. Mr. Adams has left behind him the charge that Mr. Calhoun voted in that cabinet for yielding the Executive sanction to what is known as the Missouri Compromise; while Mr. Calhoun asserted, more than once, in the Senate, in my hear ing, that his formerly official associate had, in making this statement, committed a grave and surprising error of memory. Who can believe now that either of these illus trious statesmen intended To violate truth?

At this moment, when African slavery has been swept from the face of this continent by the remorseless scythe of war, and when all of us must distinctly recognize the fact that every vestige even of its former existence must inevitably soon disappear forever, surely, both on the one side and on the other, the proper time may be regarded as having arrived when even what may have been deemed gross errors of judgment in regard to the dark and difficult constitutional question involved in the policy of restriction may at last be forgiven. When such men as Adams, Webster, Clay, Van Buren, Story, M'Lane, and Curtis assert the power of Congress to prohibit the entrance of slavery into the territories of the Union, and when such men as Calhoun and Douglas, Taney, Grier, Campbell, and Nelson assert exactly the contrary, it seems to me that ordinary Christian charity, and a becoming deference to acknowledged intellectual