DEATH OF LEWIS WILLIAMS, OF NORTH CAROLINA, AND NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER.
He was one of those meritorious and exemplary members whose labors are among the most useful to their country: diligent, modest, attentive, patriotic, inflexibly honest—a friend to simplicity and economy in the working of the government, and an enemy to all selfish, personal, and indirect legislation. He had the distinction to have his merits and virtues commemorated in the two Houses of Congress by two of the most eminent men of the age—Mr. Clay and Mr. Adams—who respectively seconded in the House to which each belonged, the customary motion for funeral honors to his memory. Mr. Adams said:
"Mr. Speaker, I second the motion, and ask the indulgence of the House for the utterance of a few words, from a heart full to overflowing with anguish which no words can express. Sir, my acquaintance with Mr. Williams commenced with the second Congress of his service in this House. Twenty-five years have since elapsed, during all which he has been always here at his post, always true to his trust, always adhering faithfully to his constituents and to his country—always, and through every political vicissitude and revolution, adhered to faithfully by them. I have often thought that this steadfastness of mutual attachment between the representative and the constituent was characteristic of both; and, concurring with the idea just expressed with such touching eloquence by his colleague (Mr. Rayner), I have habitually looked upon Lewis Williams as the true portraiture and personification of the people of North Carolina. Sir, the loss of such a man at any time, to his country, would be great. To this House, at this juncture, it is irreparable. His wisdom, his experience, his unsullied integrity, his ardent patriotism, his cool and deliberate judgment, his conciliatory temper, his firm adherence to principle—where shall we find a substitute for them? In the distracted state of our public counsels, with the wormwood and the gall of personal animosities adding tenfold bitterness to the conflict of rival interests and discordant opinions, how shall we have to deplore the bereavement of his presence, the very light of whose countenance, the very sound of whose voice, could recall us, like a talisman, from the tempest of hostile passions to the calm composure of harmony and peace.
"Mr. Williams was, and had long been, in the official language which we have adopted from the British House of Commons, the Father of the House; and though my junior by nearly twenty years, I have looked up to him in this House, with the reverence of filial affection, as if he was the father of us all. The seriousness and gravity of his character, tempered as it was with habitual cheerfulness and equanimity, peculiarly fitted him for that relation to the other members of the House, while the unassuming courtesy of his deportment and the benevolence of his disposition invited every one to consider him as a brother. Sir, he is gone! The places that have known him shall know him no more; but his memory shall be treasured up by the wise and the good of his contemporaries, as eminent among the patriots and statesmen of this our native land; and were it possible for any Northern bosom, within this hall, ever to harbor for one moment a wish for the dissolution of our National Union, may the spirit of our departed friend, pervading every particle of the atmosphere around us, dispel the delusion of his soul, by reminding him that, in that event, he would no longer be the countryman of Lewis Williams."
Mr. Clay, in the Senate, who was speaker of the House when the then young Lewis Williams first entered it, bore his ample testimony from intimate personal knowledge, to the merits of the deceased; and, like Mr. Adams, professed a warm personal friendship for the individual, as well as exalted admiration for the public man.
"Prompted by a friendship which existed between the deceased and myself, of upwards of a quarter of a century's duration, and by the feelings and sympathies which this melancholy occasion excites, will the Senate allow me to add a few words to those which have been so well and so appropriately expressed by my friend near me [Mr. Graham], in seconding the motion he has just made? Already, during the present session, has Congress, and each House, paid the annual instalment of the great debt of Nature. We could not have lost two more worthy and estimable men than those who have been taken from us. My acquaintance with the lamented Lewis Williams commenced in the fall of 1815, when he first took his seat as a member of the House of Representatives from the State of North Carolina, and I re-entered that House after my return from Europe. From that period until his death, a cordial and unbroken friendship has subsisted between us; and similar ties were subsequently created with almost every member of his highly respectable family. When a vacancy arose in the responsible and laborious office of chairman of the Committee of Claims, which had been previously filled by another distinguished and lamented son of North Carolina (the late Mr. Yancy), in virtue of authority vested in me, as the presiding officer of the House, I appointed Mr. Williams to fill it. Always full of labor, and requiring unremitting industry, it was then, in consequence of claims originating in the late war, more than ever toilsome. He discharged his complicated duties with the greatest diligence, ability, impartiality, and uprightness, and continued in the office until I left the House in the year 1825. He occasionally took part in the debates which sprung up on great measures brought for the advancement of the interests of the country, and was always heard with profound attention, and, I believe, with a thorough conviction of his perfect integrity. Inflexibly adhering always to what he believed to be right, if he ever displayed warmth or impatience, it was excited by what he thought was insincere, or base, or ignoble. In short, Lewis Williams was a true and faithful image of the respectable State which he so long and so ably served in the national councils—intelligent, quiet, unambitious, loyal to the Union, and uniformly patriotic. We all feel and deplore, with the greatest sensibility, the heavy loss we have so suddenly sustained. May it impress us with a just sense of the frailty and uncertainty of human life! And, profiting by his example, may we all be fully prepared for that which is soon to follow."
Mr. Williams reflected the character of his State; and that was a distinction so obvious and so honorable that both speakers mentioned it, and in doing so did honor both to the State and the citizen. And she illustrated her character by the manner in which she cherished him. Elected into the General Assembly as soon as age would permit, and continued there until riper age would admit him into the Federal Congress, he was elected into that body amongst the youngest of its members; and continued there by successive elections until he was the longest sitting member, and became entitled to the Parliamentary appellation of Father of the House. Exemplary in all the relations of public and private life, he crowned a meritorious existence by an exemplary piety, and was as remarkable for the close observance of all his christian obligations as he was for the discharge of his public duties.