Blessed, ever blessed be the name of God, that I am alive and have escaped unhurt from the most dreadful catastrophe that ever my eyes beheld! We arrived at New York at half past six this morning. I took leave of Mr Harrod, his daughter, my niece Elizabeth, took a hack with Mr Potter, and crossed from the East to the North River, put my baggage into the steamboat Independence, Captain Douglas, and walked to the City Hotel. I found that my wife and family proceeded thence last Monday on their way to Washington. There was a card of invitation to attend a public dinner to be given to Commodore Chauncey to-morrow; to which I wrote a declining answer. I then returned to the steamboat, which left the wharf at eight, and landed the passengers at Amboy about twenty minutes past ten. The boat was crowded almost to suffocation, and people of every land and language seemed congregated in it - among the rest, a whole tribe of wild Irish, whose language I now for the first time heard spoken. The only persons of the passengers whom I knew were David B Ogden, of New York, and Dr McDowell, whom Dr Condict introduced to me last winter at Washington, and who was then a Professor at Princeton College, but has since left it and has removed to Philadelphia.

There were upwards of two hundred passengers in the railroad cars. There were two locomotive engines, A and B, each drawing an accommodation car, a sort of moving stage, in a square, with open railing, a platform, and a row of benches holding forty or fifty persons; then four or five cars in the form of large stage coaches, each in three compartments, with doors of entrance on both sides, and two opposite benches, on each of which sat four passengers. Each train was closed with a high, quadrangular, open-railed baggage-wagon, in which the baggage of all the passengers in the train was heaped up, the whole covered with an oil-cloth. I was in car B, No 1, and of course in the second train. Of the first ten miles, two were run in four minutes, marked by a watch of a Mr De Yong, in the same car and division with me. They stopped, oiled the wheels, and proceeded. We had gone about five miles further, and had traversed one mile in one minute and thirty-six seconds, when the front left wheel of the car in which I was, having taken fire and burned for several minutes, slipped off the rail. The pressure on the right side of the car, then meeting resistance, raised it with both wheels from the rail, and it was oversetting on the left side, but the same pressure on the car immediately behind raised its left side from the rail till it actually overset to the right, and, in oversetting, brought back the car in which I was, to stand on the four wheels, and saved from injury all the passengers in it. The train was stopped, I suppose within five seconds of the time when our wheel slipped off the rail, but it was then going at the rate of sixty feet in a second, and was dragged nearly two hundred feet before it could stop. Of the sixteen persons in two of the three compartments of the car that overset, one only escaped unhurt, a Dr Cuyler. One side of the car was stove in, and almost demolished. One man, John C Stedman, of Raleigh, North Carolina, was so dreadfully mangled that he died within ten minutes; another, named, I believe, Welles, of Pennsylvania, can probably not survive the day. Captain Vanderbilt had his leg broken, as had Mr West, minister of the Episcopal Church at Newport, Rhode Island; Mrs Bartlett, wife of Lieutenant Bartlett, of the US Corps of Engineers, and her sister, dangerously hurt; her child, about three years old, is not expected to live; Mr and Mrs Charles, of St Louis, Missouri, severely cut and bruised; a Mr Dreyfuss, of Philadelphia, cut in the head and sprained in the back; and six other persons, among whom are Dr. McDowell and a young lady with him, gashed in the head and otherwise wounded.

The scene of sufferance was excruciating. Men, women, and a child scattered along the road, bleeding, mangled, moaning, writhing in torture, and dying, as a trial of feeling to which I had never before been called; and when the thought came over me that a few yards more of pressure on the car in which I was would have laid me a prostrate corpse like him who was before my eyes, or a cripple for life; and, more insupportable still, what if my wife and grandchild had been in the car behind me! Merciful God! how can the infirmity of my nature express or feel the gratitude that should swell in my bosom that this torture, a thousand-fold worse than death, has been spared me? At my request, a coroner's inquest was called upon the deceased. The other dying man was left at Hightstown, three miles beyond where the disaster happened; and, after a detention of nearly three hours, the train was resumed, and, leaving the two broken cars behind, the rest proceeded to Bordentown, thirty-five miles from Amboy. The coroner's inquest, held by a magistrate of the court, had been sworn, and I had given my testimony before we left the fatal spot. Several of the wounded were left at Hightstown. The rest were transported on cushions from the cars over the railway to Bordentown, and thence with us, in the steamboat New Philadelphia, to Philadelphia. On reaching the wharf, the Rev. Mr. Brackenridge came on board, and told me he had heard I had been seriously injured by the accident on the railway. Apprehensive that such rumors might circulate and reach my family, I wrote on board the steamboat to my wife, at Washington, and to my son Charles, at Boston, and dispatched the letters to the post-office at Philadelphia. We landed at Chestnut Street wharf between six and seven in the evening, and I took lodgings with Mr Potter, at the United States Hotel. - John Quincy Adams, diary entry