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resigned in protest, to no apparent effect. "e triumph of Mr. A. is complete," gloried Weld. "is is the first victory over the slaveholders in a body ever yet achieved since the foundation of the government, and from this time their downfall takes its date." 28 e real victory for Adams, though, would be the repeal of the Gag Rule. With every blow that he and his small band of allies in the House struck to highlight its injustices, it became harder for Southern Members to convince their Northern counterparts that the Rule was necessary, or even effective, to suppress discussion of slavery. But it would not be until the second session of the Twenty-Eighth Congress, under new Speaker John W. Jones of Virginia (fig. 11), whose conduct in the chair Adams considered "deeply tainted with slavery," that the victory would finally be won. On 3 December 1844, eight and a half years aer its adoption, the Gag Rule was finally repealed. "Perseverance has crowned the 'old man eloquent' with success," cheered one Northern newspaper. In his diary, Adams concludes the entry for that date with a simple hosanna: "Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God!" 29 is did not mark the end of Adams's trials in the House, of course. Jones was succeeded as Speaker in the Twenty-Ninth Congress by John W. Davis of Indiana (fig. 12), one of the "doughface" Northerners who had flip- flopped on the Gag Rule—to Adams's disgust. Only with the election of fellow Massachusetts Whig Robert C. Winthrop (fig. 13), at the start of the irtieth Con- gress on 6 December 1847, would Adams finally be sat- isfied with the man in the chair. Sadly, he would not live long to enjoy it. On 21 February 1848, in the eightieth year of his life and his seventeenth as a congressman, Adams suffered a stroke and collapsed at his desk in the chamber (fig. 14). "An exclamation was almost instantly heard—'Mr. Adams is dying,'" recalled Winthrop, and "more than two hundred Representatives, in all parts of the Hall and from all parts of the country, were seen rising from their seats and pressing forward toward their beloved and revered associate, almost as if it were in their power to reverse the will of God and rescue him from the power of the great destroyer." e former president was carried into the Speaker's office off the old House chamber—what is now the Lindy Claiborne Boggs Congressional Wom- en's Reading Room off Statuary Hall—and laid gently upon the same couch which remains in that room today. ere he lingered for two days before expiring peacefully; reportedly his last words were "this is the end of earth. Fig. 12. ere is no known source material for this 1911 portrait of John W. Davis by William D. Murphy (1832– 1932). Fig. 13. Robert C. Winthrop, in an 1855 photograph from the Brady-Handy photograph collection THE CAPITOL DOME 25