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John Quincy Adams: Speeches & Writings

21 essential works trace a great statesman’s lifelong engagement with the promise of America More

Edited by David Waldstreicher

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Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

For more than fifty years, in writings of remarkable breadth and insight, John Quincy Adams shaped the politics of a young America, becoming its greatest champion and most penetrating critic. Despite a persistent interest in Adams’s extraordinary life and career, there has never been a volume of his essential political writings. Here, for the first time in an annotated edition, are the complete texts of twenty-one works by this farsighted American statesman and consummate literary stylist.

The volume opens in the critical year 1787, with a twenty-year-old Adams, in his Harvard commencement oration, urging Americans to turn toward “the radiant sun of our union,” the lodestar of his political philosophy. Taking to the newspapers as “Publicola” and “Marcellus,” and then offering the first of his consequential Fourth of July addresses, Adams contributes to the rise of the first national political parties in the 1790s. Later, as a U.S. senator, in polemical works of fierce intensity, he embraces the policies of the Jefferson administration, losing the support of his Federalist base but confirming his determination to be a man of the whole nation.

That determination is tested when, as secretary of state, Adams stands alone in his defense of Andrew Jackson’s controversial invasion of Spanish Florida in a scorching diplomatic communiqué. Likewise, as president, in high-minded addresses to Congress and the people, Adams outlines a bold vision of national integration and benevolent internationalism at odds with the prevailing political winds. Throughout, roiling beneath the issues he confronts, lies the specter of slavery, threatening to pull the union apart.

Only after achieving and losing the presidency and returning to public life as a congressman from Massachusetts is Adams able to summon the voice to fully match his nationalist vision. The major works from this culminating stage of his career—when he becomes, in the words of one of his adversaries, “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed”—form the core of the volume and remain among the most dramatic and inspiring political writings in the nation’s history.

Noteworthy features of this Library of America edition include an introduction, headnotes, facsimile title pages, and a chronology of Adams’s life and political career, as well as a textual essay describing the composition and reception of the works gathered here and detailed notes illuminating their many historical and literary allusions. Two companion Library of America volumes present selections from Adams’s extensive personal diaries.

David Waldstreicher, editor, is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of numerous acclaimed works, including The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, and Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. He is the editor of A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams and, for Library of America, of The Diaries of John Quincy Adams in two volumes.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Achelis and Bodman Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

“An Oration, Delivered at the Public Commencement, in the University of Cambridge, in New England, July 18, 1787”

Letters of Publicola, June 8–July 27, 1791

Letters of Marcellus, April 24–May 11, 1793

An Oration, Pronounced July 4th, 1793, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, in Commemoration of the Anniversary of American Independence

An Oration, Delivered at Plymouth, December 22, 1802. At the Anniversary Commemoration of the First Landing of our Ancestors, at that Place

Letters of Publius Valerius, October 26–November 16, 1804

An Inaugural Oration, Delivered at the Author’s Installation, as Boylston Professor of Rhetorick and Oratory, at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On Thursday, 12 June, 1806

A Letter to the Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, a Member of the Senate of Massachusetts, on the Present State of our National Affairs; with Remarks upon Mr. Pickering’s Letter to the Governor of the Commonwealth (1808)

The Defence of General Jackson’s Conduct in the Seminole War, December 31, 1818

An Address delivered At the request of a Committee of the Citizens of Washington on the occasion of reading the Declaration of Independence, on the Fourth of July, 1821

Inaugural Address. March 4, 1825

First Annual Message. December 6, 1825

Message on the Panama Congress. March 15, 1826

Speech at the Dedication of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. July 4, 1828

An Oration Addressed to the Citizens of the Town of Quincy, on the Fourth of July, 1831, the Fifty-fifth Anniversary of the Independence of the United States of America

Report of the Minority of the Committee on Manufactures, submitted to the House of Representatives of the United States, February 28, 1833

Speech of John Quincy Adams, on the Joint Resolution for Distributing Rations to the Distressed Fugitives from Indian Hostilities in the States of Alabama and Georgia. Delivered in the House of Representatives, Wednesday, May 25, 1836.

Letters from John Quincy Adams to his Constituents of the Twelfth Congressional District in Massachusetts. To which is Added his Speech in Congress, Delivered February 9, 1837.

The Jubilee of the Constitution (1839)

Mr. Adams’ Speech, on War with Great Britain and Mexico; with the Speeches of Messrs. Wise and Ingersoll, to which it is in reply (1842)

Letter from Hon. John Quincy Adams, read at the recent celebration of West India Emancipation in Bangor, (Me.) [1843]

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