Oratory is out of fashion. The word itself sounds archaic to our ears, denoting something people used to practice in antiquity and at long length in 19th-century America. Even the more down-to-earth sounding “rhetoric” is heard to mean “mere” rhetoric—words false or deceptive by definition. Politicians talk about “messaging,” and the more significant politicians have layers of staff for “communications.” This does not bode well for the forthcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Every politician in America will feel obliged to say something for the occasion. Whoever can—with perhaps some rare exceptions—will deploy a staff member or staff members to draft his remarks. The staff members themselves, products of American universities where American history is frowned upon or given the 1619 treatment, will have to do original research to prepare for the task. A significant percentage of them will rely on A.I. Patriots have reason to wonder whether there is a politician (or comms team) in America today who understands and can articulate for his fellow citizens and the world the meaning of July 4, 1776.

John Quincy Adams took July 4, 1776 with the utmost seriousness. The Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution became the North Star of his politics over a 60-year career of devotion to his country and its cause. He understood that man is a political animal because he is endowed by nature with logos (speech, reason) and that in American politics, the statesman’s first task is to understand the logos—the word fitly spoken, the apple of gold—of the Declaration of Independence. He articulated his understanding of the Declaration and its principles beautifully, often, and at length in formal orations and other speeches and writings from the early to the late years of his remarkable political career. He served for a few years in his late 30s and early 40s, when he was also a United States senator, as the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. Later, in what his biographer Samuel Flagg Bemis called his “second career” of nine outspoken terms in the House of Representatives, he became known as “Old Man Eloquent,” in great part for his faithful championing of the principles of the Declaration. He was an avid lifelong student of Cicero.

Adams was born into the American Revolution to a mother and father who were revolutionaries. When he was seven years old, the Battle of Bunker Hill took place (Saturday, June 17, 1775) within earshot of the farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he lived with his mother, Abigail, and three siblings. On the morning of the battle, his mother took him with her and climbed to the top of nearby Penn’s Hill. From there, the two could see fire and smell the smoke from houses burning in Charlestown. John Quincy remembered the moment vividly to the end of his life. His father, John, was 400 miles away in Philadelphia as part of the Massachusetts delegation to the Second Continental Congress. Braintree was in a war zone. Weeks before, as militia streamed into the area in the wake of the battles of Lexington and Concord, Abigail Adams had collected the family’s pewter dishes and melted them down to make bullets in a large kettle held over the kitchen fire. From time to time, she heard alarms, warning that the Royal Navy was about to land forces along the coast. She had good reason to fear that the British would try to seize rebel leaders and their families. The best John Adams could do at the time was to write his wife from Connecticut: “In Case of real Danger…fly to the Woods with our Children.” July 4, 1776 was still more than a year away, undefined in the uncertain future. But seven-year-old John Quincy Adams was already learning its lessons.

On July 4, 1785, less than two years after the peace settlement ending the American war for independence, 17-year-old John Quincy, who had served as his father’s private secretary during the peace negotiations, was sailing back to America after six life-forming years in Europe. He wrote in his journal that July 4 was

the greatest day in the year, for every true American. The anniversary of our Independance. May heaven preserve it: and may the world still see:

A State where liberty shall still survive
In these late times, this evening of mankind
When Athens, Rome and Carthage are no more
The world almost in slavish sloth dissolv’d.

[From the poem “Britannia,” by James Thompson, slightly misquoted.]

The mature John Quincy would come to believe that on that date the American people declared to the world and under God principles constituting not just the foundation and purpose of their political existence, but the only foundation for legitimate government. He held that these principles of reason emerged in the providence of the Christian God through centuries of oppression and superstition, and were destined in the providence of God to spread across the earth. In God’s good time, the feudal monarchies of Europe would be overthrown and replaced by regimes based on the true principles of the American Revolution. The same providential fate awaited all the world’s barbarous, savage, or tyrannical regimes. These facts, in his mind, were perfectly compatible with the maxim he would make famous, that America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy—and equally compatible with the reality he faced throughout his political career, that America itself, in its freedom, might abandon its principles and descend into barbarous tyranny.

In Fourth of July orations over four decades, Adams would explain to his fellow citizens why and how, in fidelity to the laws of nature and nature’s God, America should, in all weathers, steer its course by the North Star of the principles of the Declaration. These orations and other speeches and writings are conveniently collected in John Quincy Adams: Speeches & Writings, recently edited by David Waldstreicher, the Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center, for the Library of America. They are full of history, reasoning, learning, and even oratory that should come in handy for those hoping to say something that rises to the occasion of the coming Semiquincentennial.

Debut

Adams delivered his first public address on July 18, 1787. He had turned 20 the week before. The occasion was his graduation from Harvard College. The faculty of the college had chosen Adams as one of the class orators at a ceremony usually attended by the governor and other Massachusetts dignitaries. The college president had chosen the topic: “The importance and necessity of public faith to the well-being of a Community.” “Public faith” referred not to religion but to respect for public debts and contracts. This was an important theme for a new nation in what young Adams (perhaps before anyone else) called a “critical period,” burdened with debt, feebly governed, and in the fateful process of framing a new constitution. It was a particularly poignant topic in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which had just put down a tax revolt that came to be known as Shays’s Rebellion.

Already in his Harvard speech, Adams called upon his fellow citizens to rally to the Union and not let local attachments get in the way. As a 20-year-old, he could sound a little more sanguine about going abroad in search of monsters than he would in more seasoned years. If Americans should keep their faith, and remain true to their new country’s cause, he said, the American eagle would soon extend the wings of protection to “the wretched object of tyranny and persecution in every quarter of the globe.” Though his theme had been chosen for him, Adams’s treatment of the theme was distinctly his own: high-minded, literary—grandiloquent, some would say—rich with historical examples ancient and modern, acutely aware of the current situation of America, and especially concerned to call his fellow citizens to “the glorious cause of freedom and of virtue.” With growing wisdom and authority, Adams would repeat and expand upon this summons in public writings and orations for the next 60 years.

His Harvard oration was well received. Typical of Adams, when Philadelphia’s Columbian Magazine sought permission to publish it, he asked that it be published anonymously so that it could be judged on its merits. Despite his request, the magazine published his oration under his name and with the addition, “son of his Excellency JOHN ADAMS, L. L. D. the American Minister at the court of London.” It appeared in the September 1787 issue, along with the newly framed (and far from ratified) U.S. Constitution, which made its first periodical appearance in that issue under the title “The new plan for a Federal Government proposed by the Convention.” Some 35 years later, when he was secretary of state, an acquaintance called to Adams’s attention a copy of the published oration. Adams reflected in his diary that “the delivery of that Oration was one of the most memorable Events of my life.” Rereading it, he blushed with humiliation at what he had been so proud of. He also recalled, characteristically, that his appointment to deliver the oration “was but the second honour of the Class” and that the “preferred rival” who received the first honor “sunk at the age of 35, to be forgotten.”

July 4, 1793

In his early 20s, as he toiled to get his law practice off the ground in Boston, Adams took to the public prints under several different pseudonyms. In 1791, as “Publicola,” he responded to the first American edition of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, publicly endorsed by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, who had been like a second father to the young John Quincy when he was in Paris in the 1780s, praised Paine’s work as a remedy for the “political heresies which have sprung up among us.” Adams and other readers recognized that those heresies were meant to include the constitutionalism his father advanced in his Discourses on Davila, which had recently appeared in a series of newspaper essays. Thus, Adams was defending his father, the vice president of the United States, against the attacks of his second father, the secretary of state. It was at first thought that the vice president was himself the author of the Publicola essays. But the real author was soon known. They were reprinted in newspapers throughout America and in pamphlet form in major cities in Great Britain and in translation on the continent—often with authorship attributed to John Adams. In 1793, with Great Britain and France at war, Adams wrote letters under the pseudonyms Marcellus, Columbus, and Barneveldt(!), defending the Washington Administration’s neutrality policy against the intrigues of Edmond-Charles Genêt, the new French minister to the United States, who was stirring up American citizens to take sides with the French revolutionaries.

John Quincy’s letters gained him a considerable reputation, including the very favorable opinion of President George Washington. In recognition of his growing stature, the “Inhabitants of the Town of Boston” invited him to deliver the annual Independence Day oration for July 4, 1793. This would be his first Fourth of July oration. As was typical of his later orations, Adams spent intense hours of study, writing, and practice, and his audience would be not only his “auditory,” as he called those gathered to hear him speak, but the contemporary readership of the always published speech and all future readers. He spoke to a capacity crowd in Boston’s Old South Meeting House. At the time of his Harvard oration, the Constitution had not yet been drafted, much less ratified; the nation was at the crisis of its “critical period.” Now, just a few years later, he spoke in a nation under a new Constitution being led by George Washington and John Adams.

Addressing his audience as “AMERICANS!” he tells them in ornate language that of all events in human history since the creation of the sun—“the heavenly orb which separated the day from the night”—none is “more highly deserving of celebration” than the establishment of their national independence. At the time of his speaking, it is only 17 years since the Declaration. “Seventeen times has the sun…diffused his prolific radiance over the plains of Independent America.” Young as the country is, he can already speak of “[m]illions of hearts which then palpitated with the rapturous glow of patriotism,” who “have already been translated to…the abodes of more than mortal freedom.” Only those in his audience “who have already passed the meridian of life” could have been active in the revolution, and in calm and settled times it is almost impossible to conceive “the tone of heroism, to which the souls of [these] freemen were exalted in that hour of perilous magnanimity.” Many in his audience, he observed, were, like him, too young to have partaken of “the divine enthusiasm which inspired the American bosom” in the revolution and enabled the “venerable assertors of the rights of mankind” to erect “the holy temple of American liberty.” The very success of the American Revolution had created days of calm serenity in which the “private and personal motives” of citizens could take the helm. But the “perilous magnanimity” of the revolutionaries, the “spirit of personal devotion to the common cause,” teaches their sons and future generations “the instructive lesson of republican virtue.”

The speech looked forward with “delightful expectation” to the toppling of Europe’s feudal monarchies. The people of France had already learned from the American Revolution, which was different from any civil contest that had ever arisen among men, that “the consent of the people is the only legitimate source of authority.” But they had also learned that it was no simple thing to translate this true principle into political reality. He asked his fellow citizens to set aside, on this festive occasion, the horrors of the French Revolution and “the subsequent European events which have let slip the dogs of war.” Today was a time to “indulge the pleasing and rational anticipation of the period, when all the nations of Europe shall partake of the blessings of equal liberty and universal peace.” This fond hope included the hope that the “sources of oppression will be drained” and that mild and amiable sentiments “shall unite in social harmony the innumerable varieties of the human race.” He looked forward to the time, announced by prophetic inspiration, when throughout the world, “the fair fabric of universal Liberty [will] rise upon the durable foundation of social equality.” He concludes by telling his fellow citizens that the time will come when

the liberated myriads of the elder world, in symphony, sweeter than the music of the spheres, shall hail your country, Americans! as the youngest daughter of Nature, and the first-born offspring of Freedom.

John Quincy Adams at 25, and for the rest of his life, would urge America to be certain of its good and providential purpose, a purpose in which all men could be united. The future of the American Revolution was in large part the future of mankind.

July 4, 1821

At the time of his 1821 oration, Adams was already a preeminent diplomat and seasoned politician. Since his last Fourth of July address in 1793, he had been minister resident to the Netherlands, minister plenipotentiary to Prussia, a United States senator from Massachusetts, America’s first minister plenipotentiary to Russia, nominated and confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court (which he declined), and minister plenipotentiary to the Court of Saint James’s. He was now the secretary of state, a position which at that time was seen as a stepping stone to the presidency. James Monroe had just been elected to his second term, and already several prominent aspirants for the presidency were letting their ambitions be known. Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun, among others, were all possible candidates, and they would consider Adams their chief rival despite the fact that he had adopted what he would come to call his “Macbeth policy.” He would not raise a hand to get himself elected president: “If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me / without my stir” (Macbeth, Act I, scene 3).

A committee of the citizens of Washington had invited Adams to give an address on the occasion of reading the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July. The setting would be the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. His audience would be members of Congress, members of the administration, foreign dignitaries, and journalists domestic and foreign. Adams did not think it was appropriate to use the ceremonial occasion to declare, as secretary of state, what might be considered official policy. And, following his Macbeth stance, he did not want to seem to be promoting his candidacy for the presidency. So, he donned his professorial robes and spoke as a private citizen. Everyone in his audience knew that the speaker before them had a good likelihood of being the next president. They also knew that he had thought more about the subjects of his oration than anyone else among them. For the reading of the Declaration of Independence that was traditional on these occasions, Adams held in his hand the original parchment copy, on which was his father’s signature. Many consider this to be Adams’s finest speech. Certainly, he uttered in the speech what would become his most famous words and one of the most famous statements of a principle of American foreign policy: America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” But in the usual quotations and applications of those words, something in their thrust and framing is often lost.

Adams explained after the speech that his main purposes were to argue against both European colonialism and Henry Clay’s call for an American hemispheric “holy alliance” to support South American revolutions as the European Holy Alliance supported monarchies. The always spirited Adams was also eager to respond to British (and European) condescension to America, as expressed in a recent article in the Edinburgh Review titled “What Has America Done for Mankind?” His spirit was particularly stirred by the writings of an Englishman widely published in American newspapers arguing that in any future war with republics like America, monarchs of Europe should not hesitate to use terror tactics like the burning of cities.

He begins his oration with a lengthy history of “the British nation,” renowned in arts and arms, which had extended its dominion over considerable parts of every quarter of the globe. It was a nation founded upon “conquest,” which for 700 years had suffered under temporal and spiritual oppression that palsied the faculties of the brave and intelligent British people, grudgingly “granting” their rights as subjects, but never “acknowledging” their rights as men. All of Europe, the most enlightened and improvable portion of the earth, suffered under the same despotic temporal and spiritual delusions. But these spiritual fetters and temporal chains could not prevent the providential “triumph of reason.” The “incompressible energies of the human intellect” that discovered gunpowder, printing, and America, and enabled man to make all kinds of “modifications of external nature,” paled into insignificance compared to advances in “the science of mind,” which brought about “improvement in the intercourse of man with his Creator, and in his acquaintance with himself.” This was an advance in the knowledge of man’s “duties and his rights.” It was a step in the progress of man “in comparison with which the Magnet and Gunpowder,…the Printing Press itself, were but the paces of a pigmy to the stride of a giant.”

From the long struggle to overcome the corruption and usurpations of the church emerged the “almost self-evident principle—that man has a right to the exercise of his own reason.” Seeking refuge from the continual war between power and right, our forefathers put behind them conquest and servitude and, “in the then wilderness of this Western World,” adopted the elementary principles of civil society for their social compact. “The slough of brutal force” was cast off, and “all was voluntary,…all was the agreement of soul with soul.”

Adams then calls his audience’s attention to the paper he is holding in his hand, not unlike Mark Antony displaying Caesar’s will before his Romans, and expresses his confidence that they will remain “[e]ver faithful to the sentiment proclaimed” in that paper. He is not inviting them to the traditional annual reading of the document so that they may recall the British tyranny to which the document was a response, or gloat over their glorious victory against overwhelming British might. The struggle against oppression is an old story that can be found in every age, as is the separation of one people from another. “Colonial subjection,” he says, can be perfectly reasonable when the subordinate state is incompetent to secure its own good. But it becomes “absurd” and “impracticable” when the dispenser of justice is in one-quarter of the globe and he to whom justice is to be dispensed is in another. All the sympathies that bind a people together and make it possible for them to have a common good as one country become impossible when distance and time make them “total strangers to each other”—as generations and an ocean had made strangers of the British and American people. And so it was that “in the moral order, no less than in the positive decrees, of Providence,” the connection between the American people and the British Government “should be dissolved.” “Yet,” he says, like Mark Antony remembering he had forgotten the will, “these are not the causes of the separation assigned in the paper which I am about to read.” This paper is immortal because it shows “our fathers” driven to take their “last stand upon the adamantine rock of human rights.”

Then Adams reads the Declaration, and having read it, reminds his audience again that it is not to remember the injustices they fought against or their triumphs over a great power that they gather annually to read this document. The interest in this “paper” which is “of every age and every clime” is “in the principles which it proclaims.” These principles express “the only legitimate foundation of civil government.” The fabric of government erected upon those principles was “destined to cover the surface of the globe.” This paper “demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest.” The example of the nation born on that day

must for ever stand, alone, a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light till time shall be lost in eternity…. So long as this planet shall be inhabited by human beings…so long shall this Declaration hold out to the sovereign and to the subject the extent and the boundaries of their respective rights and duties, founded in the laws of nature, and of nature’s God.

So much for the British nation, and all nations, founded upon conquest. Then (implicitly responding to Clay’s “holy alliance”), he calls upon his listeners “to renew the genuine Holy Alliance of [the Declaration’s] principles, to recognise them as eternal truths, and to pledge ourselves, and bind our posterity, to a faithful and undeviating adherence to them.”

He follows with a remarkably detailed narration of the War for Independence, the alliances, the peace treaty, the flawed confederation, the peaceful formation of a more perfect union under the Constitution, and the progress of the country since then during which “never, never for a moment have the great principles, consecrated by the Declaration…, been renounced or abandoned,” before he finally turns to what has been on his mind all along: the intolerable taunts of “the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world,” as expressed in the Edinburgh Review’s arrogant question, “What has America done for the benefit of mankind?”

He wastes no time getting to his defiant answer, toward which the entirety of the speech up to that point had been building: “America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.” America’s great benefit to mankind is to proclaim and demonstrate the truth that all governments based on force and conquest are illegitimate and to be “a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes” as an example of the possibility of freedom and independence. Looking to the example of America, the people of the world can know that freedom is “destined to cover the surface of the globe.” This is the essential, and often forgotten, framing of the most remembered utterance of the speech. America’s very existence is a rebuke and stumbling block to tyranny in all its forms. In the assembly of nations, often to heedless and disdainful ears, America has spoken “the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.” But America has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, “even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.” America has seen that, “probably for centuries to come,” all the contests in Europe will be

contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

He goes on to explain the reasoning behind his maxim: America

well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

Then with exquisite insolence he urges the “champions of Britannia”—“knights of chartered liberties and the rotten borough,” “improvers upon the sculpture of the Elgin marbles,” “spawners of fustian romance and lascivious lyrics,” nation based not upon freedom and right but on conquest and force—to stand forth and say, in the half century since the declaring of American independence, “what have you done for the benefit of mankind?” After a long list of English pretensions to greatness, Adams concludes that unlike Great Britain or even ancient Rome, America’s glory “is not dominion, but liberty.” He invokes the spirit of the Declaration, a spirit that “prefers before all temples the upright heart and pure.” If that spirit could “descend from his habitation in the skies” and “address each one of us here assembled, our beloved Country, Britannia ruler of the waves, and every individual among the sceptred lords of human kind; his words would be GO THOU AND DO LIKEWISE.”

The Russian minister, who congratulated himself on not attending the speech, but who had read it, considered the conclusion to be “an appeal to the nations of Europe to rise against their governments.” He judged the speech “a virulent diatribe against England” from one end to the other. The British minister also boycotted the speech, but with the printed copy he sent home to England he added the comment that it was a “masterpiece of eloquence.” Some New England Federalists criticized the speech for being too anti-British. Critics in the South and West would have liked Adams to be more expansionist. Some criticized his grandiloquent style; he retorted that a writer who aimed to reach the public needed to say something “remarkable.” To those who criticized the unorthodox form of the speech, he said it was not “constructed according to rhetorical rule” but was a “tissue of interwoven narrative and argument…in answer to the question, what has America done for the benefit of mankind?” The speech was printed and discussed in over 100 newspapers and was generally quite popular with his countrymen. Joseph Gales, editor of the National Intelligencer, thought in this moment Adams “was Demosthenes redivivus in substance and manner. I have never witnessed anything superior to the tout ensemble.”

July 4, 1831

Having won the presidential election of 1824 by the smallest vote possible in the House of Representatives, Adams acknowledged in his inaugural address that his election granted him less legitimacy than any of his predecessors, and that he must therefore depend on the indulgence of Congress and the people to carry forward his ambitious program of internal improvements. Indulgence was not forthcoming. A hostile Congress thwarted him at every turn, and the partisan press mercilessly slandered him to add insult to injury. He served one miserable term and was soundly defeated by Andrew Jackson in the memorably vicious election of 1828.

After losing to Jackson, Adams continued to follow his Macbeth policy of seeking no office. But when his neighbors asked him if, former president though he was, he would consider being their representative in Congress from the 11th district in Massachusetts, he insisted that, though he could not commit to anything, even serving as an alderman would not be beneath the dignity of a former president. He was elected to Congress in November 1830 and began what became his storied second career. In his diary, he recorded that “[n]o election or appointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure.” Soon after, he was invited by his constituents to deliver a Fourth of July address to the citizens of the town of Quincy (pronounced kwin-zee, as was his middle name). He reflected in his diary that this would be his third Fourth of July “Rhapsody.” It was almost four decades since his first in 1793, but Adams was as acutely conscious of what he thought and said in 1793 and 1821 as he had been the day he first delivered those rhapsodies. He did not want to repeat himself. The professor of rhetoric and oratory expended a paragraph reflecting on why even eloquence itself might choose to remain silent when a topic has exhausted itself. But though the truths proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence were changeless, their reception among men changed from place to place and time to time. A dangerous “political sophism”—the idea that a sovereign state could nullify a federal law it deemed unconstitutional—had gained currency in American politics, making the truths of the Declaration more urgently important than ever. This would be Adams’s theme.

“Nullification” was definitely in the air. Adams had warned his countrymen of its dangers in his valedictory presidential message to Congress on the State of the Union on December 2, 1828. The South Carolina “Exposition and Protest,” attempting to revive the doctrine of nullification or “interposition” alleged to have been asserted in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in the 1790s, was published and distributed a few weeks later. It was written anonymously by Adams’s own vice president, John C. Calhoun. The famous Webster-Hayne debate took place in January 1830—Robert Hayne of South Carolina arguing on the floor of the Senate for state sovereignty and nullification and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts championing the primacy of the Union. Adams called the debate “[t]he most important one that has taken place since the existence of the government.” He thought that “the existence of the union” depended on the issue at stake. Elder statesman James Madison, appealed to as authority (along with Thomas Jefferson) for promulgation of the doctrine of nullification in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, publicly repudiated the doctrine in a letter to Edward Everett, published in the North American Review in October 1830.

Adams would speak, then, about the epic battle between the Declaration of Independence and the doctrine of nullification—on the outcome of which hinged, not just the fate of America, but the fate of mankind. As a setting for his great theme, Adams created an oration that was a kind of liberal education in itself. There would be quotations from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s English and Roman history plays, Samuel Johnson, Blackstone’s Commentaries, Edmund Burke, Sir Walter Scott, Francis Bacon, and Edward Gibbon, and references to Don Quixote and the “Atheist Jacobite” David Hume. His audience would be taken on a tour through ancient empires, the history of Greece and Rome, centuries of English history, American history from colonial times to the administration currently in power, and through the complicated histories of Europe and South America as they struggled to respond to the principles of the American Revolution.

Adams traces the doctrine of nullification to a false understanding of “sovereignty” that was “the cause of the North American Revolution.” He quotes “The great commentator upon the laws of England,” William Blackstone, who authoritatively expressed this false doctrine:

There is, and must be, in all forms of government, however they began, or by what right soever they subsist, a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summi imperii or the rights of sovereignty, reside.

According to Adams, it was Parliament’s assertion of this false understanding of sovereignty over the American colonies that sparked the revolution, which spread from America to Europe and eventually to South America. But there is in nature no such sovereignty. “Unlimited power belongs not to the nature of man,” observes Adams, and the pretense of such power existing in every government somewhere “is incompatible with the first principle of natural right.” Asserting their natural rights against this despotic claim of sovereignty, the “representatives of the United States of America” claimed their independence. The Declaration of Independence was a solemn proclamation to the world that the people of the former colonies “had bound themselves, before God, to a primitive social compact of union, freedom and independence.” The union was not rooted in the sovereignty of the states but in the consent of the people. The union of the states “preceded their independence.”

Explicitly citing the constitution of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, Adams distills the logic of July 4, 1776:

The body politic of the United States was formed by the voluntary association of the people of the United Colonies. The Declaration of Independence was a social compact, by which the whole people covenanted with each citizen of the United Colonies, and each citizen with the whole people, that the United Colonies were, and of right ought to be, free and independent states. To this compact, union was as vital as freedom or independence. From the hour of that Declaration, no one of the states whose people were parties to it, could, without violation of that primitive compact, secede or separate from the rest. Each was pledged to all, and all were pledged to each by a concert of souls, without limitation of time, in the presence of Almighty God, and proclaimed to all mankind.… In the history of the world, this was the first example of a self-constituted nation proclaiming to the rest of mankind the principles upon which it was associated, and deriving those principles from the laws of nature.

After the historic Declaration of Independence, Adams laments, “an abortive experiment was made” between Congress and the state legislatures without recurrence to the people. This abortive experiment produced the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles, America entered upon what in his Harvard address he had called the “critical period,” which he now reflects was almost “fatal to the union”—disabling the people from keeping public faith and degrading them in the eyes of the world. “Never, even during the gloomiest moments of the revolutionary war, had the condition of the country been so calamitous as in the years immediately succeeding the peace.” The cause of the calamity was the declaration by the independent separate states of their sovereignty, following Blackstone, as an “uncontrollable, unlimited, despotic power.” The “natural offspring” of this “political sophism” is “the doctrine of nullification;—that is, the sovereign power of any one state of the confederacy to nullify any act of the whole twenty-four States, which the sovereign State shall please to consider as unconstitutional.”

This “hallucination of State sovereignty…blasted the Confederation from its birth.” Adams excuses the “pure and exalted Patriots” who constructed the “bloodless corpse” of the confederation for their lack of experience. Theirs was not an error of intention, or even of judgment. The union was a novelty, and self-government itself was an innovation. The Constitution, as the supreme law of the land—deriving its authority from the people, restoring the Declaration’s principles—was the solution. The American people, with all their divisions, had managed to live in relative happiness under the Constitution for seven administrations.

Our peace and prosperity arise, he argued, from our fidelity to the principles of the revolution, the principles of freedom and consent. The “newly revived doctrine of nullification” threatens to return us to the rule of force, in which a “sovereign” state claims to make laws not only for herself but for 23 other states.

Philosophically, politically, morally considered, it is an inversion of all human reasoning; it cannot be conceived without confusion of thought; it cannot be expressed without solecism of language, and terms of self-contradiction.… Stripped of the sophistical argumentation in which this doctrine has been habited, its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrection against the laws of the United States.

“The destinies, not only of our posterity, but of the human race, are at stake” in overcoming the despotic idea of nullification.

Turning his audience’s attention away from such “melancholy forebodings,” Adams assures them that “[p]rogressive improvement in the condition of man is apparently the purpose of a superintending Providence. That purpose will not be disappointed.” In “no delusion of national vanity, but with a feeling of profound gratitude to the God of our Fathers,” he invites them to “indulge the cheering hope and belief, that our country and her people have been selected as instruments for preparing and maturing much of the good yet in reserve for the welfare and happiness of the human race.” What equips the American people for this providential duty is the “spirit of independence,” a spirit distinctly American and commended by philosophy, religion, and patriotism as the proper and ennobling response to the fall of man.

Most of those listening to him in the Quincy meeting house, would have been familiar with a famous invocation of the spirit of independence in Fourth of July ceremonies five years before, the year John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of American independence. John Quincy Adams, who was president of the United States at the time, looked upon the historic coincidence as a sign of divine favor. For a toast on that day, John Adams had given as his last words: “Independence forever!” Now, invoking that sacred and shared memory, John Adams’s son concludes his oration by telling his constituents—his neighbors and fellow citizens—that the voice speaking to them must soon cease to be heard on earth, but that if this were to be the last breath he would breathe in this world, he would say to them and to their children “Independence and Union Forever!”

Two thousand copies of the speech were printed, then 2,000 more. They were widely distributed. Adams’s argument about the nature of the Union was not unheard of, but it was not well known, either, or fully articulated. Nathan Dane, known as the father of American jurisprudence, who had been a member of the Continental Congress and one of the authors of the Northwest Ordinance—and after whom Harvard Law School was originally named—was a New England Federalist nullifier around the time of the Hartford Convention in 1814-15. But he came around to a similar understanding of the Union at the end of his career and, after the Webster-Hayne debate in 1830, published this understanding in an appendix to his massive General Abridgement and Digest of American Law. Joseph Story, Supreme Court Justice since 1812, destined to become famous for his commentaries on the Constitution, and first Dane professor of law at Harvard, had just finished eight lectures at Harvard against nullification and against Blackstone’s theory of sovereignty. He told Adams that he would cite Adams for authority for his doctrine when he published his lectures the following year. When John Marshall, still chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, received a copy of the speech, he wrote to Adams to tell him that his understanding of the Declaration was new to him but immediately convincing. But it was Abraham Lincoln’s adoption of Adams’s reasoning, as expressed in his crucial Message to Congress on July 4, 1861, that had the most historic consequences.

Adams did not mention John C. Calhoun in his denunciation of the “political sophism” of nullification, but there is no doubt that he had him in mind. A few weeks after the oration Calhoun publicly affirmed his support of the doctrine. From then on it was clear that the disagreements between Adams and Calhoun represented the divisions of the nation that would lead to Civil War. It was after that 1831 speech that Adams in nine terms in Congress earned the sobriquet “Old Man Eloquent” by upholding the principles of the Declaration against Calhoun and the slave power until he died on the floor of Congress. Just a few months after Adams’s death, Calhoun delivered his infamous Oregon Bill speech in which he declaimed that the central proposition of the Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal—is “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.”

Ark of the Covenant

April 30, 1839 was the 50th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration as president of the United States. Congressman Adams was invited by the New York Historical Society to deliver an address for the occasion. In his later years, Adams was so famous that he received constant invitations for speeches that he could not accept. Conceiving, writing, and delivering these addresses had become increasingly difficult for him and made him anxious. As always, he doubted his ability to rise to his own impossible standards. To do the job right “would require a younger hand, and a brighter mind.” But he couldn’t resist the opportunity to present “in bold relief” this great “epocha” in American history, which marked the providential fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution. So, he would do his best. The speech—“The Jubilee of the Constitution: A Discourse Delivered at the Request of The New York Historical Society”—was so long he could only deliver a portion of it. The longer written version (120 pages) sold more than 8,000 copies within weeks. It concludes with a description of the place of the Declaration in American and providential history that would be a fitting peroration on the Fourth of July.

“Fellow citizens,” Adams said, after telling the Biblical story of the children of Israel’s entry into the promised land, “the Ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence.” All of your blessings will come from your adherence to its principles. All of your curses will come from your departure from its principles.

Lay up these principles, then, in your hearts, and in your souls—bind them for signs upon your hands, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes—teach them to your children, speaking of them when sitting in your houses, when walking by the way, when lying down and when rising up—write them upon the doorplates of your houses, and upon your gates—cling to them as to the issues of life—adhere to them as to the cords of your eternal salvation. So may your children’s children at the next return of this day of jubilee, after a full century of experience under your national Constitution, celebrate it again in the full enjoyment of all the blessings recognised by you in the commemoration of this day, and of all the blessings promised to the children of Israel upon Mount Gerizim, as the reward of obedience to the law of God.