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CHAPTER CLXXI.
DEATH OF SENATOR BARROW: MR. BENTON'S EULOGIUM

Mr. Benton. In rising to second the motion for paying to the memory of our deceased brother senator the last honors of this body, I feel myself to be obeying the impulsions of an hereditary friendship, as well as conforming to the practice of the Senate. Forty years ago, when coming to the bar at Nashville, it was my good fortune to enjoy the friendship of the father of the deceased, then an inhabitant of Nashville, and one of its most respected citizens. The deceased was then too young to be noted amongst the rest of the family. The pursuits of life soon carried us far apart, and long after, and for the first time to know each other, we met on this floor. We met not as strangers, but as friends – friends of early and hereditary recollections; and all our intercourse since – every incident and every word of our lives, public and private – has gone to strengthen and confirm the feelings under which we met, and to perpetuate with the son the friendship which had existed with the father. Up to the last moments of his presence in this chamber – up to the last moment that I saw him – our meetings and partings were the cordial greetings of hereditary friendship; and now, not only as one of the elder senators, but as the early and family friend of the deceased, I come forward to second the motion for the honors to his memory.

The senator from Louisiana (Mr. H. Johnson) has performed the office of duty and of friendship to his deceased friend and colleague. Justly, truly and feelingly has he performed it. With deep and heartfelt emotion he has portrayed the virtues, and sketched the qualities, which constituted the manly and lofty character of Alexander Barrow. He has given us a picture as faithful as it is honorable, and it does not become me to dilate upon what he has so well presented; but, in contemplating the rich and full portrait of the high qualities of the head and heart which he has presented, suffer me to look for an instant to the source, the fountain, from which flowed the full stream of generous and noble actions which distinguished the entire life of our deceased brother senator. I speak of the heart – the noble heart – of Alexander Barrow. Honor, courage, patriotism, friendship, generosity – fidelity to his friend and his country – the social affections – devotion to the wife of his bosom, and the children of their love: all – all, were there! and never, not once, did any cold, or selfish, or timid calculation ever come from his manly head to check or balk the noble impulsions of his generous heart. A quick, clear, and strong judgment found nothing to restrain in these impulsions; and in all the wide circle of his public and private relations – in all the words and acts of his life – it was the heart that moved first, and always so true to honor that judgment had nothing to do but to approve the impulsion. From that fountain flowed the stream of the actions of his life; and now what we all deplore – what so many will join in deploring – is, that such a fountain, so unexpectedly, in the full tide of its flow, should have been so suddenly dried up. He was one of the younger members of this body, and in all the hope and vigor of meridian manhood. Time was ripening and maturing his faculties. He seemed to have a right to look forward to many years of usefulness to his country and to his family. With qualities evidently fitted for the field as well as for the Senate, a brilliant future was before him; ready, as I know he was, to serve his country in any way that honor and duty should require.

CHAPTER CLXXII.
DEATH OF MR. ADAMS

"Just after the yeas and nays were taken on a question, and the Speaker had risen to put another question to the House, a sudden cry was heard on the left of the chair, 'Mr. Adams is dying!' Turning our eyes to the spot, we beheld the venerable man in the act of falling over the left arm of his chair, while his right arm was extended, grasping his desk for support. He would have dropped upon the floor had he not been caught in the arms of the member sitting next him. A great sensation was created in the House: members from all quarters rushing from their seats, and gathering round the fallen statesman, who was immediately lifted into the area in front of the clerk's table. The Speaker instantly suggested that some gentleman move an adjournment, which being promptly done, the House adjourned."

So wrote the editors of the National Intelligencer, friends and associates of Mr. Adams for forty years, and now witnesses of the last scene – the sudden sinking in his chair, which was to end in his death. The news flew to the Senate chamber, the Senate then in session, and engaged in business, which Mr. Benton interrupted, standing up, and saying to the President of the body and the senators:

"I am called on to make a painful announcement to the Senate. I have just been informed that the House of Representatives has this instant adjourned under the most afflictive circumstances. A calamitous visitation has fallen on one of its oldest and most valuable members – one who has been President of the United States, and whose character has inspired the highest respect and esteem. Mr. Adams has just sunk down in his chair, and has been carried into an adjoining room, and may be at this moment passing from the earth, under the roof that covers us, and almost in our presence. In these circumstances the whole Senate will feel alike, and feel wholly unable to attend to any business. I therefore move the immediate adjournment of the Senate."

The Senate immediately adjourned, and all inquiries were directed to the condition of the stricken statesman. He had been removed to the Speaker's room, where he slightly recovered the use of his speech, and uttered in faltering accents, the intelligible words, "This is the last of earth;" and soon after, "I am composed." These were the last words he ever spoke. He lingered two days, and died on the evening of the 23d – struck the day before, and dying the day after the anniversary of Washington's birth – and attended by every circumstance which he could have chosen to give felicity in death. It was on the field of his labors – in the presence of the national representation, presided by a son of Massachusetts (Robert C. Winthrop, Esq.), in the full possession of his faculties, and of their faithful use – at octogenarian age – without a pang – hung over in his last unconscious moments by her who had been for more than fifty years the worthy partner of his bosom. Such a death was the "crowning mercy" of a long life of eminent and patriotic service, filled with every incident that gives dignity and lustre to human existence.

I was sitting in my library-room in the twilight of a raw and blustering day, the lamp not yet lit, when a note was delivered to me from Mr. Webster – I had saved it seven years, just seven – when it was destroyed in that conflagration of my house which consumed, in a moment, so much which I had long cherished. The note was to inform me that Mr. Adams had breathed his last; and to say that the Massachusetts delegation had fixed upon me to second the motion, which would be made in the Senate the next day, for the customary funeral honors to his memory. Seconding the motion on such an occasion always requires a brief discourse on the life and character of the deceased. I was taken by surprise, for I had not expected such an honor: I was oppressed; for a feeling of inability and unworthiness fell upon me. I went immediately to Mr. Winthrop, who was nearest, to inquire if some other senator had been named to take my place if I should find it impossible to comply with the request. He said there was none – that Mr. Davis, of Massachusetts, would make the motion, and that I was the only one named to second him. My part was then fixed. I went to the other end of the city to see Mr. Davis, and so to arrange with him as to avoid repetitions – which was done, that he should speak of events, and I of characteristics. It was late in the night when I got back to my house, and took pen and paper to note the heads of what I should say. Never did I feel so much the weight of Cicero's admonition – "Choose with discretion out of the plenty that lies before you." The plenty was too much. It was a field crowded with fruits and flowers, of which you could only cull a few – a mine filled with gems, of which you could only snatch a handful. By midnight I had finished the task, and was ready for the ceremony.

Mr. Adams died a member of the House, and the honors to his memory commenced there, to be finished in the Senate. Mr. Webster was suffering from domestic affliction – the death of a son and a daughter – and could not appear among the speakers. Several members of the House spoke justly and beautifully; and of these, the pre-eminent beauty and justice of the discourse delivered by Mr. James McDowell, of Virginia (even if he had not been a near connection, the brother of Mrs. Benton), would lead me to give it the preference in selecting some passages from the tributes of the House. With a feeling and melodious delivery, he said:

"It is not for Massachusetts to mourn alone over a solitary and exclusive bereavement. It is not for her to feel alone a solitary and exclusive sorrow. No, sir; no! Her sister commonwealths gather to her side in this hour of her affliction, and, intertwining their arms with hers, they bend together over the bier of her illustrious son – feeling as she feels, and weeping as she weeps, over a sage, a patriot, and a statesman gone! It was in these great characteristics of individual and of public man that his country reverenced that son when living, and such, with a painful sense of her common loss, will she deplore him now that he is dead.

"Born in our revolutionary day, and brought up in early and cherished intimacy with the fathers and founders of the republic, he was a living bond of connection between the present and the past – the venerable representative of the memories of another age, and the zealous, watchful, and powerful one of the expectations, interests, and progressive knowledge of his own.

"There he sat, with his intense eye upon every thing that passed, the picturesque and rare one man, unapproachable by all others in the unity of his character and in the thousand-fold anxieties which centred upon him. No human being ever entered this hall without turning habitually and with heart-felt deference first to him, and few ever left it without pausing, as they went, to pour out their blessings upon that spirit of consecration to the country which brought and which kept him here.

"Standing upon the extreme boundary of human life, and disdaining all the relaxations and exemptions of age, his outer framework only was crumbling away. The glorious engine within still worked on unhurt, uninjured, amid all the dilapidations around it, and worked on with its wonted and its iron power, until the blow was sent from above which crushed it into fragments before us. And, however appalling that blow, and however profoundly it smote upon our own feelings as we beheld its extinguishing effect upon his, where else could it have fallen so fitly upon him? Where else could he have been relieved from the yoke of his labors so well as in the field where he bore them? Where else would he himself have been so willing to have yielded up his life, as upon the post of duty, and by the side of that very altar to which he had devoted it? Where but in the capitol of his country, to which all the throbbings and hopes of his heart had been given, would the dying patriot be so willing that those hopes and throbbings should cease? And where but from this mansion-house of liberty on earth, could this dying Christian more fitly go to his mansion-house of eternal liberty on high?"

Mr. Benton concluded in the Senate the ceremonies which had commenced in the House, pronouncing the brief discourse which was intended to group into one cluster the varied characteristics of the public and private life of this most remarkable man:

"The voice of his native State has been heard, through one of the senators of Massachusetts, announcing the death of her aged and most distinguished son. The voice of the other senator from Massachusetts is not heard, nor is his presence seen. A domestic calamity, known to us all, and felt by us all, confines him to the chamber of grief while the Senate is occupied with the public manifestations of a respect and sorrow which a national loss inspires. In the absence of that senator, and as the member of this body longest here, it is not unfitting or unbecoming in me to second the motion which has been made for extending the last honors of the Senate to him who, forty-five years ago, was a member of this body, who, at the time of his death, was among the oldest members of the House of Representatives, and who, putting the years of his service together, was the oldest of all the members of the American government.

"The eulogium of Mr. Adams is made in the facts of his life, which the senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Davis) has so strikingly stated, that from early manhood to octogenarian age, he has been constantly and most honorably employed in the public service. For a period of more than fifty years, from the time of his first appointment as minister abroad under Washington, to his last election to the House of Representatives by the people of his native district, he has been constantly retained in the public service, and that, not by the favor of a sovereign, or by hereditary title, but by the elections and appointments of republican government. This fact makes the eulogy of the illustrious deceased. For what, except a union of all the qualities which command the esteem and confidence of man, could have insured a public service so long, by appointments free and popular, and from sources so various and exalted? Minister many times abroad; member of this body; member of the House of Representatives; cabinet minister; President of the United States; such has been the galaxy of his splendid appointments. And what but moral excellence the most perfect; intellectual ability the most eminent; fidelity the most unwavering; service the most useful; would have commanded such a succession of appointments so exalted, and from sources so various and so eminent? Nothing less could have commanded such a series of appointments; and accordingly we see the union of all these great qualities in him who has received them.

"In this long career of public service, Mr. Adams was distinguished not only by faithful attention to all the great duties of his stations, but to all their less and minor duties. He was not the Salaminian galley, to be launched only on extraordinary occasions; but he was the ready vessel, always under sail when the duties of his station required it, be the occasion great or small. As President, as cabinet minister, as minister abroad, he examined all questions that came before him, and examined all, in all their parts – in all the minutiæ of their detail, as well as in all the vastness of their comprehension. As senator, and as a member of the House of Representatives, the obscure committee-room was as much the witness of his laborious application to the drudgery of legislation, as the halls of the two Houses were to the ever-ready speech, replete with knowledge, which instructed all hearers, enlightened all subjects, and gave dignity and ornament to all debate.

"In the observance of all the proprieties of life, Mr. Adams was a most noble and impressive example. He cultivated the minor as well as the greater virtues. Wherever his presence could give aid and countenance to what was useful and honorable to man, there he was. In the exercises of the school and of the college – in the meritorious meetings of the agricultural, mechanical, and commercial societies – in attendance upon Divine worship – he gave the punctual attendance rarely seen but in those who are free from the weight of public cares.

"Punctual to every duty, death found him at the post of duty; and where else could it have found him, at any stage of his career, for the fifty years of his illustrious public life? From the time of his first appointment by Washington to his last election by the people of his native town, where could death have found him but at the post of duty? At that post, in the fulness of age, in the ripeness of renown crowned with honors, surrounded by his family, his friends, and admirers, and in the very presence of the national representation, he has been gathered to his fathers, leaving behind him the memory of public services which are the history of his country for half a century, and the example of a life, public and private, which should be the study and the model of the generations of his countrymen."

The whole ceremony was inconceivably impressive. The two Houses of Congress were filled to their utmost capacity, and of all that Washington contained, and neighboring cities could send – the President, his cabinet, foreign ministers, judges of the Supreme Court, senators and representatives, citizens and visitors.

CHAPTER CLXXIII.
DOWNFALL OF SANTA ANNA: NEW GOVERNMENT IN MEXICO: PEACE NEGOTIATIONS: TREATY OF PEACE

The war was declared May 13th, 1846, upon a belief, grounded on the projected restoration of Santa Anna (then in exile in Havana), that it would be finished in ninety to one hundred and twenty days, and that, in the mean time, no fighting would take place. Santa Anna did not get back until the month of August; and, simultaneously with his return, was the President's overture for peace, and application to Congress for two millions of dollars – with leave to pay the money in the city of Mexico on the conclusion of peace there, without waiting for the ratification of the treaty by the United States. Such an overture, and such an application, and the novelty of paying money upon a treaty before it was ratified by our own authorities, bespoke a great desire to obtain peace, even by extraordinary means. And such was the fact. The desire was great – the means unusual; but the event baffled all the calculations. Santa Anna repulsed the peace overture, put himself at the head of armies, inflamed the war spirit of the country, and fought desperately. It was found that a mistake had been made – that the sword, and not the olive branch had been returned to Mexico; and that, before peace could be made, it became the part of brave soldiers to conquer by arms the man whom intrigue had brought back to grant it. Brought back by politicians, he had to be driven out by victorious generals before the peace he was to give could be obtained. The victories before the city of Mexico, and the capture of the city, put an end to his career. The republican party, which abhorred him, seized upon those defeats to depose him. He fled the country, and a new administration being organized, peaceful negotiations were resumed, and soon terminated in the desired pacification. Mr. Trist had remained at his post, though recalled, and went on with his negotiations. In three months after his downfall, and without further operation of arms, the treaty was signed, and all the desired stipulations obtained. New Mexico and Upper California were ceded to the United States, and the lower Rio Grande, from its mouth to El Paso, taken for the boundary of Texas. These were the acquisitions. On the other hand, the United States agreed to pay to Mexico fifteen millions of dollars in five instalments, annual after the first; which first instalment, true to the original idea of the efficacy of money in terminating the war, was to be paid down in the city of Mexico as soon as the articles of pacification were signed, and ratified there. The claims of American citizens against Mexico were all assumed, limited to three and a quarter millions of dollars, which, considering that the war ostensibly originated in these claims, was a very small sum. But the largest gratified interest was one which did not appear on the face of the treaty, but had the full benefit of being included in it. They were the speculators in Texas lands and scrip, now allowed to calculate largely upon their increased value as coming under the flag of the American Union. They were among the original promoters of the Texas annexation, among the most clamorous for war, and among the gratified at the peace. General provisions only were admitted into the treaty in favor of claims and land titles. Upright and disinterested himself, the negotiator sternly repulsed all attempts to get special, or personal provisions to be inserted in behalf of any individuals or companies. The treaty was a singular conclusion of the war. Undertaken to get indemnity for claims, the United States paid those claims herself. Fifteen millions of dollars were the full price of New Mexico and California – the same that was paid for all Louisiana; so that, with the claims assumed, the amount paid for the territories, and the expenses of the war, the acquisitions were made at a dear rate. The same amount paid to Mexico without the war, and by treating her respectfully in treating with her for a boundary which would include Texas, might have obtained the same cessions; for every Mexican knew that Texas was gone, and that New Mexico and Upper California were going the same way, both inhabited and dominated by American citizens, and the latter actually severed from Mexico by a successful revolution before the war was known of, and for the purpose of being transferred to the United States.

The treaty was a fortunate event for the United States, and for the administration which had made it. The war had disappointed the calculation on which it began. Instead of brief, cheap, and bloodless, it had become long, costly, and sanguinary: instead of getting a peace through the restoration of Santa Anna, that formidable chieftain had to be vanquished and expelled, before negotiations could be commenced with those who would always have treated fairly, if their national feelings had not been outraged by the aggressive and defiant manner in which Texas had been incorporated. Great discontent was breaking out at home. The Congress elections were going against the administration, and the aspirants for the presidency in the cabinet were struck with terror at the view of the great military reputations which were growing up. Peace was the only escape from so many dangers, and it was gladly seized upon to terminate a war which had disappointed all calculations, and the very successes of which were becoming alarming to them.

Mr. Trist signed his treaty in the beginning of February, and it stands on the statute-book, as it was in fact, the sole work on the American side, of that negotiator. Two ministers plenipotentiary and envoys extraordinary were sent out to treat after he had been recalled. They arrived after the work was done, and only brought home what he had finished. His name alone is signed to the treaty on the American side, against three on the Mexican side: his name alone appears on the American side in the enumeration of the ministers in the preamble to the treaty. In that preamble he is characterized as the "plenipotentiary" of the United States, and by that title he was described in the commission given him by the President. His work was accepted, communicated to the Senate, ratified; and became a supreme law of the land: yet he himself was rejected! recalled and dismissed, without the emoluments of plenipotentiary; while two others received those emoluments in full for bringing home a treaty in which their names do not appear. Certainly those who served the government well in that war with Mexico, fared badly with the administration. Taylor, who had vanquished at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterey, and Buena Vista, was quarrelled with: Scott, who removed the obstacles to peace, and subdued the Mexican mind to peace, was superseded in the command of the army: Frémont, who had snatched California out of the hands of the British, and handed it over to the United States, was court-martialled: and Trist, who made the treaty which secured the objects of the war, and released the administration from its dangers, was recalled and dismissed.