Teleology is dangerous, and spoilers often irritating. But observant readers will have deduced that John Gallison (1788-1820) couldn’t have lived too long after his work on the Missouri Compromise memorial and the address to the Peace Society in 1819. To disclose how it all turned out, we present Gallison’s final journal entries.
This installment is a grand send-off, with notes on his social, intellectual, and professional life in both Marblehead and Boston. Extensive notes on Sunday sermons, an enthusiastic spectator’s comments on the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, and an afternoon of civilized conversation with former President Adams over lunch at Josiah Quincy’s house on Beacon Hill all come up for discussion.
Adams, of course, was quite retired from public life by this time. His anointment as president of the convention was an act of homage only, which he gratefully acknowledged before surrendering the post to a younger man.
To clarify one of Adams’s remarks, Gallison’s mother was a Sewall, which connected her to the Quincy family. One of his Quincy cousins was the famous “Aunt Scott”– otherwise known as Dorothy Quincy Hancock Scott– from whom we have heard much already. Abigail Adams would, of course, also have been a relation, even if he never met her or claimed familiarity with her son, his law tutor.
As an additional bonus, we enclose Gallison’s index for the final volume. Along with page numbers and marginal notes, he often added these to each volume in order to make his future study more productive, even once trying a method recommended by John Locke. This is a bit simpler, and it leaves a decent overview of his other topics for the year.
We cannot know if Gallison’s terminal illness was already plaguing him. His handwriting did get increasingly erratic as the month wore on, although that may be simply be an expression of haste that his more fastidious youth would not have permitted. Regardless of when the illness struck, John Gallison died on Christmas Eve, almost exactly a year after his Peace Society address in 1819. His symptoms, as detailed in William Ellery Channing’s lengthy obituary, are consistent with viral encephalitis, although some sleuthing in his later journal entries might turn up other causes.
In any case, his friends and colleagues did their best to honor him. Not just Channing, but Josiah Quincy and others left generous published tributes. The Massachusetts Supreme Court bar voted to wear crepe for the rest of their session, and his mentor Joseph Story reserved time at the end of his 1821 address to the Suffolk Bar Association to reflect at length on Gallison’s virtues. The merchant Jonathan Wren Ward named his next son John Gallison Ward. Otherwise, John Gallison had no descendants that we know of.
After years of complaining about shortages of cash, John Gallison left behind 500 law books that were sold at auction. His father lived a few more years and left a decent estate to his stepmother, which kept her comfortable in Marblehead for the rest of her life.