Posterity (29 page)

Churchill said his crowd went home today to see how the vote in England came out. I am going to Frankfurt tomorrow and inspect some American divisions.

Friday we resume sessions and I believe we shall wind up Sunday so I should be out to sea on Tuesday and home by Sunday August 4th.

Had a telegram today saying Harry had safely landed at Washington Air Port. He should be home by the time this letter gets to you. I hope you and your mamma will be at the White House when I get back to Washington. That old barn is terribly lonely for me alone. Especially since I'm so hemmed in.

Kiss Mamma & lots for you

XXXXXXXXXXXX Dad

Rosetta Douglass

Woodrow Wilson (center) and family (Jessie second from left)

Loss

J
OHN
Q
UINCY
A
DAMS TO
J
OHN
A
DAMS

“May it be your lot in life to enjoy the society even
of a few spirits, so nearly approaching
to perfection as hers . . .”

Upon reading heartbreaking news in a letter from his fifteen-year-old son, Secretary of State Adams immediately left his Washington office and went home. He had just learned that his mother, Abigail Adams, at seventy-four years old had died in her bedroom in Quincy, Massachusetts, on October 28 of typhoid fever. John Quincy Adams adored and revered his mother, and he appreciated, too, that without her steadfast, intelligent, and “affectionate participation and cheering encouragement,” his father, John Adams, could not have endured and accomplished all he had. “There is not a virtue that can abide in the female heart but it was the ornament of hers,” John Quincy wrote in his diary.

To his second son, John, who was in school in Massachusetts, he wrote the following letter. The loss was particularly profound for young John and his brother George, as the elder Adamses, Abigail and John, had cared for the boys entirely for nearly six years, from 1809 to 1815, while their parents, John Quincy and Louisa Catherine, were serving the United States government in Russia.

Washington 2 November 1818

My dear Son:

Your letter of the 28th of last month, has this day brought me the most distressing intelligence that I ever received, yet my dear John, if there was any thing that could soften its bitterness, it was that it should first come from a beloved and affectionate hand. Such it was coming from yours, and I thank you, for the kind and filial attention with which you immediately communicated the event, by which it has pleased God to remove my ever blessed Mother to a better world. I thank you too for the same attention, with which you repeatedly wrote to your mother, during the illness of mine, and which apprised us of her real situation, when we were too ready to trust in the hopes, which other friends fondly cherished by listening to their ardent wishes. I pray you to return your mothers and my most affectionate and grateful thanks to Miss Harriet Welsh both for her kind and unwearied attendance on my mother in her illness, and for the assiduous and active friendship with which she wrote from time to time, while a lingering hope was left, to keep it alive in our breasts.

You have lost, my dear son, one of the kindest, and most precious of parents, for such she truly was to you, and to all my children. If you live, as I hope and pray you may, to an age as advanced as hers, you will never meet on earth one, to whom you will owe deeper obligations, or who will be to you a more faithful and affectionate friend. May it be your lot in life to enjoy the society even of a few spirits, so nearly approaching to perfection as hers, and above all, my son, may he who is the supreme God, inspire and guide your conduct through your earthly career, so that at the final scene, you may surrender your spirit to its creator as unsullied as was hers. I have no greater blessing to bestow. Be it yours, and be it that of your brothers!

From your affectionate father

John Quincy Adams

D
ANIEL
W
EBSTER TO
C
HARLES
W
EBSTER

“But ah! thy little day is done,—”

Just before his third birthday, Charles Webster died at home after a two-week battle with “lung fever.” At the time of the little boy's death, his father, Congressman Daniel Webster, was departing from Monticello after a meeting with eighty-one-year-old Thomas Jefferson. Upon hearing the news, Webster, having already endured the loss of a daughter to tuberculosis, now lamented being absent at the time of his son's death. He wrote this short poem to his dead son in an effort to console his grief-stricken wife.

[c. January 1, 1825]

My son, thou wast my hearts delight
Thy morn of life was gay & cheery:
That morn has rushed to sudden night.
Thy fathers house is sad & dreary

I held thee on my knee, my son!
And kissed thee laughing, kissed thee weeping:
But ah! thy little day is done,—
Thou'rt with thy angel sister sleeping.

The staff, on which my years should lean,
Is broken, 'ere those years come over me,
My
funeral rites
thou
should'st have seen,
But thou art in the tomb before me

Thou rear'st to me, no filial stone.
No parents grave, with tears, beholdest;
Thou are my ancestor, my son!
And stand'st in Heaven's account, the oldest.

On earth my lot was soonest cast,
Thy generation after mine;
Thou has thy predecessor past.
Earlier Eternity is thine.

I should have set before thine eyes
The road to Heaven, & showed it clear;
But thou, untaught springest to the skies teacher
And leavest the father lingering here

Sweet Seraph, I would learn of thee
And hasten to partake thy bliss!
And oh! to thy world welcome me,
As erst I welcomed thee to this.

Dear Angel, thou art safe in Heaven:
No prayers for thee need more be made
Oh! let thy prayer for thee be given,
Who oft have blessed thine infant head.

My Father, I beheld thee born,
and led thy tottering steps with care;
Before me risen to Heaven's bright morn
My Son! My Father! Guide me there—

F
REDERICK
D
OUGLASS TO
R
OSETTA
D
OUGLASS
S
PRAGUE

“The peace of death is with the living
not with the dead.”

In a baritone voice that was thunderous and clear, Frederick Douglass exposed nineteenth-century Americans of the North to the evils of slavery in a way no one ever had before. With broad shoulders and a deep chest, he stood over six feet tall and he knew his subject well as he himself was an escaped slave. He moved and stirred the nation with his speeches and best-selling autobiographies. When the Civil War was over, Douglass at first felt all he had worked for had been accomplished. Yet the struggle “for the ultimate peace and freedom of [his] race” continued throughout his life and he consistently protested publicly against racial discrimination of any kind.

He was the father of five children, one of whom, Annie, died when she was just eleven years old. His concern for his children never dwindled, even when they reached adulthood. He worked to help find them careers and to set them on solid paths toward their futures, but they were always a financial drain and concern to him. Of particular worry was his eldest child, Rosetta, who married Nathan Sprague, a man who seemed to fail and disappoint at every opportunity. It was Rosetta who stood as the main support for her seven children.

In 1875, from his new home in Washington, D.C., Douglass wrote to his daughter in Rochester, New York. Exactly three years earlier the Douglass house in Rochester was burned to the ground by an arsonist. The circumstances of the illness and death of Rosetta's daughter, Alice, described in the following letter are unclear. Likely Douglass wrote to Rosetta for himself and for her mother, Anna Murray Douglass, his wife of thirty-seven years, who remained illiterate until her death.

Washington, D.C. June 3, 1875

My dear Rosa:

Nearly six weeks ago, I received a telegram from dear Nathan, almost in the precise words of the one which came yesterday, and since that time I have been waiting daily expecting to learn that the dear suffering child had passed beyond the reach of care, trouble, sickness and pain. Since it now seems that the dear child cannot live and that she could never be strong and healthy if she did live, her passing away will be a happy release from a life of misery. With her high spirit, a life of weakness and dependence would be intolerable.

I hope dear Rosa, that you are thoroughly nerved for the event, that you are wholly emancipated from the superstitious terrors with which priest craft has surrounded the great and universal fact of death and that you will be able to look with calmness upon the peaceful features of the dear child whose sufferings are ended. Death is the common lot of all and the strongest of us will soon be called away. It is well! Death is a friend not an enemy. It comes at the right time when it comes naturally, and not by violence. It takes the feeble infant from prospective misery and releases the aged from continued aches and pains. The peace of death is with the living not with the dead. We shall all miss our dear little Alice. She was the remarkable child of your flock, a real character. The memory of her words and ways will live with us all. I do not dogmatize as to the life of the future. I know not and no man can know what is beyond or what is the condition of existence, whether conscious or unconscious, beyond this life, but whatever else it may be, it is nothing that our taking thought about can alter or improve. The best any of us can do is to trust in the eternal powers which brought us into existence and this I do for myself and for all.

I do not think our house should be left alone or entirely in the hands of strangers. We have been burnt out once and may be burnt out again, and if burnt out a second time I have no more strength to start life anew again and build up another house.

We are not among friends here any more than in Rochester. It is our misfortune to create envy wherever we go. The white people don't like us and the colored people envy us. I do not wish to burden Amelia with the responsibility of taking care of all here and she told mother before she went away that she did not want to take the responsibility.

Your father,
Fred K Douglass

H
ARRIET
B
EECHER
S
TOWE TO
G
EORGIANA
S
TOWE

“. . . mamma is sitting weary by the wayside, feeling weak and worn, but in no sense discouraged.”

Author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Harriet Beecher Stowe was America's first great female novelist. She was a member of the socially reforming and outspoken Beecher family and the mother of seven children. By 1858 Stowe had already lost two sons; eighteen-month-old Charley died during a cholera epidemic, and nineteen-year-old Henry, a sophomore at Dartmouth College, drowned in the currents of the Connecticut River. Here, at forty-seven years old, she writes to her fourteen-year-old daughter, Georgiana, nearly two years after Henry's death.

February 12 [1858]

My dear Georgie,

Why have n't I written? Because, dear Georgie, I am like the dry, dead leafless tree, and have only cold, dead, slumbering buds of hope on the end of stiff, hard, frozen twigs of thought, but no leaves, no blossoms; nothing to send to a little girl who does n't know what to do with herself any more than a kitten. I am cold, weary, dead; everything is a burden to me.