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TITLE: ORATIONS
AUTHOR: JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
EBOOK: E03548 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

John Quincy Adams, "Orations"

"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 solemn oath faithfully to execute the
office of President of the United States, and to the best of his
ability to preserve, 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 momentous and solemn duties
that he was about to assume, had delivered to him a suit of
celestial armor--a helmet, consisting of the principles of piety,
of justice, of honor, of benevolence, with which from his
earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the
presence 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 contemporaries of the human race, in all their
stages of civilization; 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 political, of all the classes which for
the two preceding centuries had agitated and divided the people
of the British islands--and with them were intermingled the
descendants 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 furnaces, but all
furnaces of affliction, one clear, steady flame of liberty.  Bold
and daring enterprise, stubborn endurance of privation,
unflinching intrepidity in facing danger, and inflexible
adherence to conscientious principle, had steeled to energetic
and unyielding hardihood 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 itself
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 Britain.  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 written 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 liberties--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 offences 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 omnipotence 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 throughout 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, remonstrance, 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 definitively
established in fact, by war and peace.  The independence of
each separate State had never been declared of right.  It never
existed in fact.  Upon the principles of the Declaration of
Independence, the dissolution of the ties of allegiance, the
assumption of sovereign 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 severance 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 member of that
assembly, which had laid down in terms so clear, so explicit, so
unequivocal, the foundation of all just government, in the
imprescriptible rights of man, and the transcendent sovereignty
of the people, and who in those principles had set forth their
only personal vindication from the charges of rebellion against
their king, and of treason to their country, that their last
crowning act was still to be performed upon the same
principles.  That is, the institution, by the people of the United
States, of a civil government, to guard and protect and defend
them all.  On the contrary, that same assembly which issued
the Declaration of Independence, instead of continuing to act in
the name and by the authority of the good people of the United
States, had, immediately after the appointment of the
committee to prepare the Declaration, appointed another
committee, of one member from each colony, to prepare and
digest the form of confederation to be entered into between the
colonies.

That committee reported on the twelfth of July, eight days
after the Declaration of Independence had been issued, a draft
of articles of confederation between the colonies.  This draft
was prepared by John Dickinson, then a delegate from
Pennsylvania, who voted against the Declaration of
Independence, and never signed it, having been superseded by
a new election of delegates from that State, eight days after his
draft was reported.

There was thus no congeniality of principle between the
Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. 
The foundation of the former was a superintending Providence-
-the rights of man, and the constituent revolutionary power of
the people.  That of the latter was the sovereignty of organized
power, and the independence of the separate or dis-united
States.  The fabric of the Declaration and that of the
Confederation were each consistent with its own foundation,
but they could not form one consistent, symmetrical edifice. 
They were the productions of different minds and of adverse
passions; one, ascending for the foundation of human
government to the laws of nature and of God, written upon the
heart of man; the other, resting upon the basis of human
institutions, and prescriptive law, and colonial charter.  The
cornerstone of the one was right, that of the other was power....

Where, then, did each State get the sovereignty, freedom, and
independence, which the Articles of Confederation declare it
retains?--not from the whole people of the whole Union--not
from the Declaration of Independence--not from the people of
the State itself.  It was assumed by agreement between the
Legislatures of the several States, and their delegates in
Congress, without authority from or consultation of the people
at all.

In the Declaration of Independence, the enacting and
constituent party dispensing and delegating sovereign power is
the whole people of the United Colonies.  The recipient party,
invested with power, is the United Colonies, declared United
States.

In the Articles of Confederation, this order of agency is
inverted.  Each State is the constituent and enacting party, and
the United States in Congress assembled the recipient of
delegated power--and that power delegated with such a
penurious and carking hand that it had more the aspect of a
revocation of the Declaration of Independence than an
instrument to carry it into effect.

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