Bunker Hill

joyful.”
    Later that evening the ornate figures of the lion and the unicorn (representing England and Scotland) that bracketed the gable at the front of what Adams now called the State House were taken down and burned in a bonfire along with the king’s arms from the courthouse. Boston had survived, but “every vestige” of the king was destroyed that night. “Thus ends royal authority . . . ,” Abigail wrote, “and all the people shall say Amen.”

 

    Epilogue—Character Alone
    O n the evening of June 17, 1843, the seventy-five-year-old John Quincy Adams stood in front of his son’s house in Quincy (formerly a part of Braintree), Massachusetts. It was the sixty-eighth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, and despite the fact that an immense celebration had occurred in Charlestown honoring the completion of a new 221-foot-high granite obelisk, Adams had as always spent the day at home, where he “visited my seedling trees” and attended to his correspondence.
    The festivities had begun early that morning on Boston Common, where soldiers, veterans, freemasons, firemen, and many others had assembled for a parade that extended for two miles as it made its way through the city and across the Warren Bridge to Charlestown. The hundred or so veterans of the American Revolution had traveled in twenty-six different carriages, one of which had even contained a “miniature monument” in tribute to what was called the Battle of Lexington. Also present was no less a personage than the president of the United States, John Tyler, who traveled with his two sons in a barouche drawn by six black horses and flanked by a detachment of lancers.
    But perhaps the most noted attendee was the legendary Daniel Webster, the U.S. senator and renowned speaker. By all accounts it was a stirring scene in Charlestown once Tyler and the other dignitaries had settled in their seats and Webster had begun to speak. “In front of the orator and upon either side of him was a dense and countless mass of human beings . . . ,” a reporter for the
Daily Atlas
wrote. “Crowning all, and raising its lofty head to the clouds in calm sublimity, stood the majestic monument, glistening in the rays of the bright sun.”
    But John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States and now a lowly but very active member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was having none of it. “What a name in the annals of mankind is Bunker Hill?” he recorded in his diary. “What a day was that 17th June 1775? And what a burlesque upon both is an oration upon them by Daniel Webster, and a pilgrimage of John Tyler . . . to desecrate the solemnity by their presence!”
    Now, in the twilight of a long political career, Adams had emerged as what one Virginia legislator described as “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.” Two years before, Adams had argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on the behalf of the slaves who had led a bloody revolt aboard the schooner
Amistad
. Much as the lawyer James Otis had done back in 1761, when he insisted that the writs of assistance violated the British constitution (the legal case that John Quincy’s father had claimed initiated the series of events that became the American Revolution), he had insisted before the Supreme Court that maritime law and property rights did not apply when a human being’s fundamental freedoms had been violated. And unlike Otis, John Quincy had won his case.
    Just the winter before he had so infuriated his congressional colleagues from the South with his insistence that all petitions regarding slavery must be read before the House that they had moved to censure him. The resulting two-week hearing had given Adams exactly the forum he wanted (it is “a trial,” he rather immodestly wrote at the time, “[in] which the liberties of my country are enduring in my person”), and best of all, the ouster attempt had failed. When his family and friends suggested it might be time for him to retire, he responded, “The world will retire from me before I shall retire from the world.”
    From Adams’s perspective, both Webster and Tyler were guilty of turning their backs on the all-important issue of slavery. Webster was, he wrote in his diary, “a heartless traitor to the cause of human freedom,” while the president was “a slave monger.” Adams’s sixty-eight-year-old memories of the Battle of Bunker Hill were too personal, too