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John Quincy Adams Signed July 4th Oration Pamphlet Gifted to Unitarian Minister William E. Channing
John Quincy Adams Signed July 4th Oration Pamphlet Gifted to Unitarian Minister William E. Channing
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Adams John Quincy




John Quincy Adams Signed July 4th Oration Pamphlet Gifted to Unitarian Minister William E. Channing

 

First edition presentation copy of John Quincy Adams's patriotic speech delivered at Newburyport, Massachusetts on July 4, 1837, signed and dedicated by him to friend William Ellery Channing (1780-1848). The half title page is inscribed in Adams's hand as “Revd William E. Channing D.D. from John Quincy Adams.”

 

Former 6th U.S. President John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), then a U.S. Congressman from Massachusetts, delivered a Fourth of July speech that would later be published as An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, at Their Request, on the Sixty-First Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1837 (Newburyport, MA: Morss and Brewster, 1837). The original printed pamphlet, with gilt top textblock and blue wrappers, has been bound in later twentieth-century blue half morocco leather boards. The whole is housed in a handsome clamshell case lined in cobalt blue suede. Slight wear to spine. Within the pamphlet, there is evidence of a soft vertical fold and isolated foxing. A minor tear present on page 23, else near fine. The 68pp pamphlet measures 12mo or 5.5" x 9.25".

 

When presenting books, Adams almost always signed his name on a slip that would later be pasted into the book. This scarce speech is all the more rare because it is signed and inscribed directly on the original wrapper. Sabin 294.

 

Massachusetts native and elder statesman John Quincy Adams had been invited by residents of Newburyport, in northeastern coastal Massachusetts, to make some remarks on America's birthday. Adams offered a unique perspective to a new generation of Americans. As a self-described "citizen of a former age," Adams could evaluate the success of the American experiment, as well as recommend further courses of action (Oration, 5). According to Adams, Americans should take America's 61st birthday as an opportunity to truly "judge the tree by its fruit" (Oration, 26).

 

In the speech, Adams gave a brief history of the United States from the American Revolution to the present day. He called the overthrow of the British government one of the "brightest achievements of human virtue" (Oration, 22-23). Adams valorized the signers of the Declaration of Independence as "an assembly of Planters, Shopkeepers and Lawyers" eager to assert and defend their natural rights (Oration, 6). He analyzed the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, and the relative strength of the Constitution. Overall, Adams emphasized that the America was a single entity rather than a group of loosely confederated states.

 

Adams told his listeners: "You are here, to pause a moment and take breath, in the ceaseless and rapid race of time; -- to look back and forward; -- to take your point of departure from the ever memorable transactions of the day of which this is the anniversary…These are the glories of a generation past away, -- what are the duties that devolve upon us?" (Oration, 13). For Adams, the American experiment had been largely successful, but much had yet to be done to preserve the United States. Adams identified nullification, states’ rights, slavery, and war as the greatest obstacles to its future success.

 

During Adams’s 1825-1829 presidency, Congress had passed a tariff designed to protect American industry, and while it benefited the North, economically devastated Southerners labeled it the “Tariff of Abominations.” This tariff, as well as another one authorized by 7th U.S. President Andrew Jackson in July 1832, led some states' right supporters to challenge the constitutionality of the tariffs and endorse their nullification. In 1837, the doctrine of nullification remained controversial, as did the polarizing conflict over slavery.

 

Excerpts

 

“We have consulted the records of the past, and I have appealed to your consciousness of the present; and what is the sound, which they send forth to all the echoes of futurity, but Union;—Union as one People,—Union so as to be divided by no act whatever.” (48)

 

“The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction, than by the author of the Declaration himself. No charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge. Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery.” (50)

 

“I would repeat the question with which this discourse was introduced:—‘Why are you assembled in this place’?—and one of you would answer me for all,—Because the Declaration of Independence, with the voice of an angel from heaven, ‘put to his mouth the sounding alchemy,’ and proclaimed universal emancipation upon earth!” (53)

 

“But of all the events tending to the blessed accomplishment of the prophesy so often repeated in the book of Isaiah, and re-proclaimed by the multitude of the heavenly host at the birth of the Saviour, there is not one that can claim, since the propagation of the Christian faith, a tenth, nay a hundredth part of the influence of the resolution, adopted on the second day of July, 1776, and promulgated to the world, in the Declaration of Independence, on the fourth of that month, of which this is the sixty-first anniversary.” (62)

 

“…say with me . . . that specific future improvement in the condition of man, which consists in the extirpation of slavery and war from the face of the earth.” (64)

 

John Quincy Adams, son of 2nd U.S. President John Adams, served successively as minister to the Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, and Britain before acting as Monroe's Secretary of State between 1817-1825. He then served one largely frustrating term as president, lost reelection to Andrew Jackson, and stood for election to the House of Representatives in 1831. Here he served seventeen memorable years, becoming a bulwark for civil liberties and a voice in the emerging anti-slavery movement. He defended the Amistad slaves before the Supreme Court in 1841, and died of a stroke on the floor of the House in 1848.

 

William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) was born in Rhode Island and graduated first in his class from Harvard College in 1798. A sermon he delivered in Baltimore in 1819 led to the organization in 1825 of the first Unitarian denomination in America. He opposed slavery but also personally believed that African Americans were inferior and needed supervision. Alexis de Tocqueville described Channing as “the most celebrated preacher and most remarkable author of the present time in America.”

 

Adams and Channing knew each other through church. John and Abigail Adams were members of the First Parish Church of Quincy, part of the liberal wing of New England Congregationalism that became Unitarian. More conservative than Channing, Adams nonetheless admired the preacher’s earnestness; the pair became strong allies on the issue of slavery.

 



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