On the 18th of September, 1872, Maury spoke to the Farmers’ Club of Norfolk, Massachusetts, near Boston. On this occasion, he made a very tactful speech with happy references to his old friend John Quincy Adams, and used only the portions of his previous speeches in favor of meteorological and agricultural observations, that were best adapted to a Northern audience. From here he traveled to St. Louis by way of New York, Niagara Falls (Buffalo), Detroit, and Chicago. On October 9, before the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Association at its annual fair, he spoke as in the year previously on the plan of international coöperation, using the same arguments but adding that at the recent International Congress of Statisticians at St. Petersburg, Russia his scheme had been cheered “by the huzzas of Russians, hochs of Germans, vivas of Latin races, and the hurrahs of the English”, and that a special committee had been appointed to further the movement.
Maury was so exhausted, however, by the time he reached St. Louis and was so ill that he could hardly read his address in an audible tone. As a matter of fact, in the summer preceding this lecture tour he had been very ill of the gout and was for a time on crutches. Consequently, when he reached home after spending some two weeks in St. Louis, he was too ill to attend the first annual fair of the Seaboard Agricultural Society, which he was to have addressed at Norfolk, Virginia, on October 23. His address had already been prepared; and as it turned out to be his last, its contents are of peculiar interest. He appealed to the farmers in regard to the necessity of coöperation for self-protection and redress against transportation monopolies and all sources of oppression and discouragement; he contended that domestic commerce should be attended to by Congress as carefully as foreign trade, but that special legislation protected the latter while the former was left to the tender mercies of great corporations; he touched upon his favorite topic of weather observations and crop reports, and many other questions such as tolls and tariffs, the government of railroads, interior water lines and canal projects, the conjunction of the Atlantic and the Mississippi River valley, east and west trunk lines and branches and the ways and means of constructing them without increase of taxation, the regulation of commerce between the states, the naval establishment and wherein it needed reforms, immigration, and labor and capital.
Maury was destined not to live to see the scheme of meteorological observations and crop reports, upon which he had spent so much thought and labor, in operation; but not long after his death a part of his program was carried out when there was an international conference of meteorologists at Vienna in 1873, the United States being represented by General Albert James Myer of the Signal Service of the Army. There are, indeed, those who would deny him any part in the establishment of the present Weather Bureau. On the contrary, there are others who would go to the opposite extreme and give him all the credit for bringing it about. For example, Mr. E. P. Dorr, who was at one time an observer for the Smithsonian and afterwards President of the Board of Lake Underwriters, wrote to Mr. Thompson B. Maury, at that time (1873) in the Signal Office, in Washington that Maury’s “intelligent, original mind invented and suggested the present system of meteorological observations; and the writer wishes this in some way to be put upon record, to do justice to the dead Maury, a man whose name and memory will live in all civilized countries on the globe, throughout all time, as an original, great mind.... I could not rest unless I told some one that the late M. F. Maury was the originator in design and detail, in all its parts, of the present system of meteorological observations now so generally taken all over the country”.
The question of due credit is a perplexing one; but certainly no one could cavil at the modest claim made by Maury’s son Matthew in the following letter: “In 1869, Abbé took the question up and began issuing local forecasts from Cincinnati Observatory and out of his success here and efforts in Washington grew the Weather Bureau in November, 1870, with General Myer at its head, to whom belongs the credit of working up all the details and putting the thing on such a practical footing. Till now the Washington work is the admiration of all the world as its daily charts and reports embrace not only the United States but the whole of the northern hemisphere, Australia, and the Cape of Good Hope. Now I think that any calm mind can only say for Father that he had the clearness of foresight to foresee what could be done for the land with the aid of regular stations and the telegraph, but we can’t in the smallest degree say that its practical success is due to him. In the future, General Myer will have that credit. Father’s reputation must rest on his work at sea and a biography can only speak of other things as indications of his clear and far-seeing mind. The world is full of similar cases in all great improvements, and the world invariably gives the credit not to the man who first thought of them but to the man who puts the ideas into practise”.
When Maury was stricken with sickness on his last lecturing tour, he seemed to realize that he would not recover, for when he arrived at home and entered the house he said to his wife, “My dear, I am come home to die”. He was immediately helped to his bed, though death did not come until after four long months, during a portion of which time he suffered extreme pain. When not suffering too much, he occupied himself with a revision of his “Physical Geography”.
During his long illness, the strength of his Christian faith displayed itself, and he became wholly resigned to the inevitable. Job had always been his favorite book in the Bible; and the 130th Psalm, which he called “De Profundis” and which was sung at Luther’s funeral amid the tears of the people, was read to him, at his request, many times during his last days. He was greatly comforted by a week’s visit which his brother-in-law, Dr. Brodie S. Herndon of Savannah, made him in the December preceding his death. And towards the end he sent sincere farewell messages to Commodore Jansen in Holland, whom he had loved for many years as a brother, and also to Dr. Tremlett who had brightened with his friendship the desolate years of his exile in England and had influenced him to enter the communion of the Church. A few days before his death he dismissed his physicians, saying, “Don’t come to see me any more; leave me to the great Physician”.
He derived his greatest consolation and satisfaction from having his family about him, for whom he had always shown throughout his life the tenderest affections of a devoted father and husband. As he talked to them, there would come flashes of his quaint playful humor that had always been so characteristic of him; and he requested that there be no weeping in his presence. He rejoiced in being able to recognize all his family to the end. “You see”, said he, “how God has answered my prayers, for I know you every one.... I shall retain my senses to the last. God has granted me that as a token of my acceptance. I have set my house in order, my prayers have all been answered, my children are gathered round my bed—and now Lord, what wait I for?” Then he would repeat the prayer which he had composed thirty years before when his leg was broken, and which he had repeated in his daily devotions ever since: “Lord Jesus, thou Son of God and Redeemer of the world, have mercy upon me! Pardon my offenses, and teach me the error of my ways; give me a new heart and a right mind. Teach me and all mine to do Thy will, and in all things to keep Thy law. Teach me also to ask those things necessary for eternal life. Lord, pardon me for all my sins, for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen”.
On the evening before his death, the family sang for him verses from his favorite hymn, “Christ Is Risen”, which he called “Pass over Jordan”, and also from “How Firm a Foundation”. After the singing he said so that all could hear, “The peace of God which passeth all understanding be with you all—all!” Toward the end he inquired of his son Richard, “Are my feet growing cold? Do I drag my anchors?” Upon receiving an affirmative answer, he said, “All’s well”. About fifteen minutes before he died, his wife and daughters were requested by him to leave the room, and he was left with his two sons and two sons-in-law. At 12.40 P.M., on Saturday, February 1, 1873, his life came to a close.
The body lay in state in the hall of the Library of Virginia Military Institute from four o’clock in the afternoon of Monday until Wednesday. The gallery round the hall was festooned with black, a large anchor and a cross of evergreens being placed at alternate angles; while the columns were draped spirally. The wall was covered with maps constructed under Maury’s supervision, and on opposite sides of the gallery were placed two heavily draped flags, the one being that of his native state Virginia, and the other that of his adopted state Tennessee. In the center of the hall rested the bier, bearing his body, with his breast covered with the foreign orders that had been conferred upon him, and with a gentle smile on his face. Near the bier stood a large globe bearing this appropriate inscription: “The whole world is mourning for Maury”.
A funeral service was held in the hall on Wednesday about noon, by the Reverend William Pendleton, D. D. of Grace Church, after which the coffin, attended by the cadet battalion and the faculty of Virginia Military Institute and the professors and students of Washington and Lee University[26] and the citizens of Lexington, was conveyed to the Gilham vault in the city cemetery, just opposite the tomb of “Stonewall” Jackson. This, however, was only a temporary resting-place. When, shortly before his death, his wife had requested of Maury that she be permitted to bury him in Richmond, he had replied, “Very well, my dear; then let my body remain here until the spring, and when you take me through the Goshen Pass you must pluck the rhododendrons and the mountain-ivy and lay them upon me”.