Adams, John Quincy - Orations

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Orations by John Quincy Adams is a publication of the Pennsylvania State University. This Portable Document

file is furnished free and without any charge of any kind. Any person using this document file, for any

purpose, and in any way does so at his or her own risk. Neither the Pennsylvania State University, nor Jim

Manis, Faculty Editor, nor anyone associated with the Pennsylvania State University assumes any responsibility

for the material contained within the document or for the file as an electronic transmission, in any way.

Orations by John Quincy Adams, the Pennsylvania State University, Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA

18201-1291 is a Portable Document File produced as part of an ongoing student publication project, The Penn-

sylvania State University’s Electronic Classics Series, to bring classical works of literature, in English, to free

and easy access of those wishing to make use of them.

The Pennsylvania State University is an equal opportunity University.

Orations

John Quincy Adams

“The Jubilee of the Constitution, delivered

at New York, April 30, 1839, before the New

York Historical Society.”

Fellow-Citizens and Brethren, Associates of the New

York Historical Society:

Would it be an unlicensed trespass of the imagination

to conceive that on the night preceding the day of which

you now commemorate the fiftieth anniversary—on the

night preceding that thirtieth of April, 1789, when from

the balcony of your city hall the chancellor of the State

of New York administered to George Washington the sol-

emn oath faithfully to execute the office of President of

the United States, and to the best of his ability to pre-

serve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United

States—that in the visions of the night the guardian

angel of the Father of our Country had appeared before

him, in the venerated form of his mother, and, to cheer

and encourage him in the performance of the momen-

tous and solemn duties that he was about to assume,

had delivered to him a suit of celestial armor—a hel-

met, consisting of the principles of piety, of justice, of

honor, of benevolence, with which from his earliest in-

fancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the pres-

ence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the self-

evident truths of the Declaration of Independence; a

sword, the same with which he had led the armies of

his country through the war of freedom to the summit

of the triumphal arch of independence; a corselet and

cuishes of long experience and habitual intercourse in

peace and war with the world of mankind, his contem-

poraries of the human race, in all their stages of civili-

zation; and, last of all, the Constitution of the United

States, a shield, embossed by heavenly hands with the

future history of his country?

Yes, gentlemen, on that shield the Constitution of the

United States was sculptured (by forms unseen, and in

characters then invisible to mortal eye), the predestined

and prophetic history of the one confederated people

of the North American Union.

They had been the settlers of thirteen separate and

distinct English colonies, along the margin of the shore

of the North American Continent; contiguously situated,

but chartered by adventurers of characters variously

diversified, including sectarians, religious and politi-

cal, of all the classes which for the two preceding cen-

turies had agitated and divided the people of the Brit-

ish islands—and with them were intermingled the de-

scendants of Hollanders, Swedes, Germans, and French

fugitives from the persecution of the revoker of the Edict

of Nantes.

In the bosoms of this people, thus heterogeneously

composed, there was burning, kindled at different fur-

naces, but all furnaces of affliction, one clear, steady

flame of liberty. Bold and daring enterprise, stubborn

endurance of privation, unflinching intrepidity in fac-

ing danger, and inflexible adherence to conscientious

principle, had steeled to energetic and unyielding har-

dihood the characters of the primitive settlers of all

these colonies. Since that time two or three generations

of men had passed away, but they had increased and

multiplied with unexampled rapidity; and the land it-

self had been the recent theatre of a ferocious and bloody

seven years’ war between the two most powerful and

most civilized nations of Europe contending for the

possession of this continent.

Of that strife the victorious combatant had been Brit-

ain. She had conquered the provinces of France. She

had expelled her rival totally from the continent, over

which, bounding herself by the Mississippi, she was

thenceforth to hold divided empire only with Spain. She

had acquired undisputed control over the Indian tribes

still tenanting the forests unexplored by the European

man. She had established an uncontested monopoly of

the commerce of all her colonies. But forgetting all the

warnings of preceding ages—forgetting the lessons writ-

ten in the blood of her own children, through centuries

of departed time—she undertook to tax the people of

the colonies without their consent.

Resistance, instantaneous, unconcerted, sympathetic,

inflexible resistance, like an electric shock, startled and

roused the people of all the English colonies on this

continent.

This was the first signal of the North American Union.

The struggle was for chartered rights—for English lib-

Orations of John Quincy Adams

erties—for the cause of Algernon Sidney and John

Hampden—for trial by jury—the Habeas Corpus and

Magna Charta.

But the English lawyers had decided that Parliament

was omnipotent—and Parliament, in its omnipotence,

instead of trial by jury and the Habeas Corpus, enacted

admiralty courts in England to try Americans for of-

fences charged against them as committed in America;

instead of the privileges of Magna Charta, nullified the

charter itself of Massachusetts Bay; shut up the port of

Boston; sent armies and navies to keep the peace and

teach the colonies that John Hampden was a rebel and

Algernon Sidney a traitor.

English liberties had failed them. From the omnipo-

tence of Parliament the colonists appealed to the rights

of man and the omnipotence of the God of battles. Union!

Union! was the instinctive and simultaneous cry through-

out the land. Their Congress, assembled at Philadelphia,

once—twice—had petitioned the king; had remonstrated

to Parliament; had addressed the people of Britain, for

the rights of Englishmen—in vain. Fleets and armies,

the blood of Lexington, and the fires of Charlestown

and Falmouth, had been the answer to petition, remon-

strance, and address ….

The dissolution of allegiance to the British crown, the

severance of the colonies from the British Empire, and

their actual existence as independent States, were de-

finitively established in fact, by war and peace. The in-

dependence of each separate State had never been de-

clared of right. It never existed in fact. Upon the prin-

ciples of the Declaration of Independence, the dissolu-

tion of the ties of allegiance, the assumption of sover-

eign power, and the institution of civil government, are

all acts of transcendent authority, which the people alone

are competent to perform; and, accordingly, it is in the

name and by the authority of the people, that two of

these acts—the dissolution of allegiance, with the sev-

erance from the British Empire, and the declaration of

the United Colonies, as free and independent States—

were performed by that instrument.

But there still remained the last and crowning act,

which the people of the Union alone were competent to

perform—the institution of civil government, for that

compound nation, the United States of America.

At this day it cannot but strike us as extraordinary,

that it does not appear to have occurred to any one

Orations of John Quincy Adams

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Adams, John Quincy - Orations

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