Foreword by CrisHam
Probably no US politician since the Founding Fathers has illuminated the foundations of freedom with such clarity as John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States (1825-1829). In his speech celebrating the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he exposed the false morality of the opponents of freedom and demonstrated the principles by which liberal democracy can be permanently kept out of their sphere of influence.
But in disregard of these far-sighted warnings, the US has abandoned its course as a peaceful model for all other nations and exchanged it for a scandalously unsuccessful militaristic one. The complete text of this speech, particularly in its conclusion, provides the urgently needed principles for finding our way out of the current security chaos and back to sustainable forms of defense of freedom.
John Quincy Adams' Speech from 04 July 1821, on the 45th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence 1776
An address delivered at the request of a committee of the of the Citizens of Washington; on the occasion of reading THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, on the Fourth of July 1821.
FELLOW-CITIZENS:
Until within a few days preceding that which we have again assembled to commemorate, our Fathers, the people of this Union, had constituted a portion of the British nation; a nation renowned in Arts and Arms, who, from a small Island in the Atlantic Ocean, had extended their dominion over considerable parts of every quarter of the Globe. Governed themselves by a race of kings, whose title to sovereignty had originally been founded in conquest, spell-bound for a succession of ages under that portentous system of despotism and of superstition which in the name of the meek arid humble Jesus had been spread over the Christian world, the history of this nation had, for a period of seven hundred years, from the days of the conquest till our own, exhibited a conflict almost continual, between the oppressions of power and the claims of right. In the theories of the Crown and the Mitre man had no rights. Neither the body nor the soul of the individual was his own. From the impenetrable gloom of this intellectual darkness, and the deep degradation of this servitude, the British nation had partially emerged. The martyrs of religious freedom had consumed to ashes at the stake: the champions of temporal liberty had bowed their heads upon the scaffold; and the spirits of many a bloody day had left their earthly vesture upon the field of battle, and soared to plead the cause of Liberty before the throne of Heaven.
The people of Britain, through long ages of civil war, had extorted from their tyrants not acknowledgements, but grants, of right. With this concession they had been content to stop in the progress of human improvement. They received their freedom as a donation from their sovereigns; they appealed for their privileges to a sign manual and a seal; they held their title to liberty, like their title to lands, from the bounty of a man; and in their moral and political chronology, the great charter of Runny Mead was the beginning of the world.
From the earliest ages of their recorded history, the inhabitants of the British Islands have been distinguished for their intelligence and their spirit. How much of these two qualities, the fountains of all amelioration in the condition of men, was stifled by these two principles of subserviency to ecclesiastical usurpation, and of holding rights as the donation of kings, this is not the occasion to inquire.
Of their tendency to palsy the vigor and enervate the faculties of man, all philosophical reasoning, and all actual experience, concur in testimony.
These principles, however, were not peculiar to the people of Britain. They were the delusions of all Europe, still the most enlightened and most improvable portion of the earth. The temporal chain was riveted upon the people of Britain by the conquest. Their spiritual fetters were forged by subtlety working upon superstition. Baneful as the effect of these principles was, they could not for ever extinguish the light of reason in the human mind. The discovery of the Mariner’s Compass was soon followed by the extension of intercourse between nations the most distant, and which, without that light beaming in darkness to guide the path of man over the boundless waste of waters, could never have been known to each other. The invention of Printing, and the composition of Gunpowder, which revolutionized at once the art and science of war, and the relations of peace; the revelation of India to Vasco de Gama; and the disclosure to Columbus of the American hemisphere, all resulted from the incompressible energies of the human intellect, bound and crippled as it was by the double cords of ecclesiastical imposture and political oppression. To these powerful agents in the progressive improvement of our species, Britain can lay no claim. For them the children of men are indebted to Italy, to Germany, to Portugal, and to Spain. All these improvements, however, consisted in successful researches into the properties and modifications of external nature. The religious reformation was an improvement in the science of mind; an improvement in the intercourse of man with his Creator, and in his acquaintance with himself. It was an advance in the knowledge of his duties and his rights. It was a step in the progress of man in comparison with which the Magnet and Gunpowder, the wonders of either India; nay, the Printing Press itself, were but the paces of a pigmy to the stride of a giant. If to this step of human advancement Germany likewise lays claim in the person of Martin Luther, or in the earlier but ineffectual martyrdom of John Huss, England may point to her Wicliffe as a yet more primitive vindicator of the same righteous cause, and may insist on the glory of having contributed her share to the improvement of the moral condition of man.
The corruptions and usurpations of the Church were the immediate objects of these reformers; but, at the foundation of all their exertions, there was a single, plain, and almost self-evident principle-that man has a right to the exercise of his own reason. It was this principle which the sophistry and rapacity of the Church had obscured and obliterated, and which the intestine divisions of the same Church itself first restored. The triumph of reason was the result of inquiry and discussion, Centuries of desolating wars have succeeded, and oceans of human blood have flowed for the final establishment of this principle; but it was from the darkness of the Cloister that the first spark was emitted, and from the arches of an University that it first kindled into day. From the discussion of religious rights and duties, the transition to that of the political and civil relations of men with one another, was natural and unavoidable; in both, the reformers were met by the weapons of temporal power. At the same glance of reason, the tiara would have fallen from the brow of priesthood, and the despotic sceptre would have departed from the hand of royalty, but for the sword by which they were protected-that sword which, like the flaming sword of the Cherubim, turned every way to debar access to the tree of life.
The double contest against the oppressors of the Church and State was too appalling for the vigor, or too comprehensive for the faculties of the reformers of the European Continent. In Britain alone was it undertaken, and in Britain but partially succeeded.
It was in the midst of that fermentation of the human intellect which brought right and power in direct and deadly conflict with each other, that the rival crowns of the two portions of the British Island, were united on the same head. It was then that, released from the manacles of ecclesiastical domination, the minds of men began to investigate the foundations of civil government. But the mass of the nation surveyed the fabric of their institutions as it existed in fact. It had been founded in conquest; it had been cemented in servitude, and so broken and moulded had been the minds of this brave and intelligent people to their actual condition, that instead of solving civil society into its first elements in search of their rights, they looked back only to conquest as the origin of their liberties, and claimed their rights but as donations from their kings.
This faltering assertion of freedom is not chargeable indeed upon the whole nation. There were spirits capable of tracing civil government to its foundation in the moral and physical nature of man; but conquest and servitude were so mingled up in every particle of the social existence of the nation, that they had become vitally necessary to them, as a portion of the fluid, itself destructive of life, is indispensably blended with the atmosphere in which we live.
Fellow-Citizens, it was in the heat of this war of moral elements, which brought one Stuart to the block, and hurled another from his throne, that our forefathers sought refuge from its fury, in the then wilderness of this Western World.
They were willing exiles from a country dearer to them than life.—But they were the exiles of liberty and of conscience, dearer to them even than their country. They came too with Charters from their kings: for even in removing to another hemisphere, they “cast longing, lingering, looks behind,” and were anxiously desirous of retaining ties of connexion with their country, which, in the solemn compact of a charter, they hoped by the corresponding links of allegiance and protection to preserve.
But to their sense of right, the charter was only the ligament between them, their country, and their king. Transported to a new world, they had relations with one another, and relations with the aboriginal inhabitants of the country to which they came, for which no royal charter could provide. The first settlers of the Plymouth colony, at the eve of landing from their ship, therefore, bound themselves together by a written covenant; and, immediately after landing, purchased from the Indian natives the right of settlement upon the soil.
Thus was a social compact formed upon the elementary principles of civil society, in which conquest and servitude had no part. The slough of brutal force was entirely cast off: all as voluntary; all was unbiassed consent; all was the agreement of soul with soul.
Other colonies were successively founded, and other charters granted, until, in the compass of a century and a half, thirteen distinct British Provinces peopled the Atlantic shores of the North American continent with two millions of freemen; possessing by their charters the rights of British Subjects, and nurtured by their position and education, in the more comprehensive and original doctrines of human rights. From their infancy they had been treated by the parent state with neglect, harshness, and injustice. Their charters had often been disregarded and violated; their commerce restricted and shackled; their interests wantonly or spitefully sacrificed; so that the hand of the parent had been scarcely ever felt, but in the alternate application of whips and scorpions.
When in spite of all these persecutions, by the natural vigor of their constitution, they were just attaining the maturity of political manhood, a British Parliament, in contempt of the clearest maxims of natural equity, in defiance of the fundamental principle upon which British freedom itself had been cemented with British blood; on the naked unblushing allegation of absolute and uncontrollable power, undertook by their act, to levy, without representation and without consent, taxes upon the people of America, for the benefit of the people of Britain. This enormous project of public robbery was no sooner made known, than it excited throughout the colonies one general burst of indignant resistance. It was abandoned, reasserted and resumed, until fleets and armies were transported, to record in the characters of fire, famine, and desolation, the transatlantic wisdom of British legislation, and the tender mercies of British consanguinity.
Fellow-citizens, I am speaking of days long past. Ever faithful to the sentiment proclaimed in the paper which I am about to present[1] once more to your memory of the past and to your forecast of the future; you will hold the people of Britain, as you hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in war; in peace Friends. The conflict for Independence is now itself but a record of history. The resentments of that age may be buried in oblivion. The stoutest hearts which then supported the tug of war are cold under the clod of the valley. My purpose is to rekindle no angry passion from its embers: but this annual solemn perusal of the instrument which proclaimed to the world the causes of your existence as a nation, is not without its just and useful purpose.
It is not by the yearly reiteration of the wrongs endured by your fathers, to evoke from the Sepulchre of Time, the shades of departed Tyranny; it is not to dray from their dread abode the frailties of an unfortunate monarch who now sleeps with his fathers, and the sufferings of whose latter days may have atoned at the bar of Divine Mercy, for the sins which the accusing Angel will read from this scroll to his charge; it is not to exult in the great moral triumph by which the Supreme Governor of the world crowned the cause of your country with success. No, the purpose for which you listen with renewed and never-languishing delight to the reading of this paper is of a purer and more exalted cast. It is sullied with no vindictive recollection. It is degraded by no rankling resentment. It is inflated with no vain and idle exultation of victory.
The Declaration of Independence in its primary purport was merely an occasional state paper. It was a solemn exposition to the World, of the causes which had compelled the people of a small portion of the British empire to cast off the allegiance and renounce the protection of the British king; and to dissolve their social connexion with the British people. In the annals of the human race, the separation of one people into two, is an event of no uncommon occurrence. The successful resistance of a people against oppression, to the downfall of the tyrant and of tyranny itself, is the lesson-of many an age, and of almost every clime. It lives in the venerable records of Holy Writ. It beams in the brightest pages of profane history. The names of Pharaoh and Moses, of Tarquin and Junius Brutus, of Geisler and Tell, of Christiern and Gustavus Vasa, of Philip of Austria and William of Orange, stand in long array through the visto of Time, like the Spirit of Evil and the Spirit of Good, in embattled opposition to each other, from the mouldering ages of antiquity, to the recent memory of our fathers, and from the burning plains of Palestine, to the polar frost of Scandinavia.
For the Independence of North America, there were ample and sufficient causes in the laws of moral and physical nature. The tie of colonial subjection, is compatible with the essential purposes of civil government, only when the condition of the subordinate state is from its weakness incompetent to its own protection. Is the greatest moral purpose of civil government the administration of justice? And if justice has been truly defined the constant and perpetual will of securing to every one his right, how absurd and impracticable is that form of polity, in which the dispenser of justice is in one quarter of the globe, and he to whom justice is to be dispensed is in another; where ” moons revolve and oceans roll between the order and its execution; where time and space must be annihilated to secure to every one his right.
The tie of colonial subjection may suit the relations between a great naval power, and the settlers of a small and remote Island in the incipient stages of society : but was it possible for British intelligence to imagine, or British sense of justice to desire, that through the boundless ages of time, the swarming myriads of freemen, who were to civilize the wilderness, and fill with human life the solitudes of this immense continent, should receive the mandates of their earthly destinies from a council chamber at St. James’s, or bow forever in submission to the omnipotence of St. Stephen’s Chapel? Are the essential purposes of civil government, to administer to the wants, and to fortify the infirmities of solitary man? To unite the sinews of numberless arms, and combine the councils of multitudes of minds, for the promotion of the well-being of all?
The first moral clement then of this composition is sympathy between the members of which it consists; the second is sympathy between the giver and the receiver of the Law. The sympathies of men begin with the affections of domestic life. They are rooted in the natural relations of husband and wife, of parent and child, of brother and sister; thence they spread through the social and moral propinquities of the neighbor and friend, to the broader and more complicated relations of countryman and fellow-citizen; terminating only with the circumference of the globe which we inhabit, in the co-extensive charities incident to the common nature of man. To each of these relations, different degrees of sympathy are allotted by the ordinances of nature. The sympathies of domestic life are not more sacred and obligatory, but closer and more powerful, than those of neighborhood and friendship. The tie which binds us to our country, is not more holy in the sight of God, but it is more deeply seated in our nature, more tender and endearing, than that looser link which merely connects us with our fellow mortal man.
It is a common Government that constitutes our Country. But in THAT association, all the sympathies of domestic life and kindred blood, all the moral ligatures of friendship and of neighborhood, are combined with that instinctive and mysterious connexion between man and physical nature, which binds the first perceptions of childhood in a chain of sympathy with the last gasp of expiring age, to the spot of our nativity, and the natural objccts by which it is surrounded. These sympathies belong and are indispensable to the relations ordained by nature between the individual and his country. They dwell in the memory and are indelible in the hearts of the first settlers of a distant colony. These arc the feelings under which the Children of Israel “sat down by the rivers of Babylon, and wept when they remembered Zion.” These are the sympathies under which they “hung their harps upon the willows,” and instead of songs of mirth, exclaimed, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” But these sympathies can never exist for a country, which we have never seen. They are transferred in the breasts of the succeeding generations, from the country of human institution, to the country of their birth; from the land of which they have only heard, to the land where their eyes first opened to the day. The tics of neighborhood are broken up, those of friendship can never be formed, with an intervening ocean; and the natural ties of domestic life, the all-subduing sympathies of love, the indissoluble bonds of marriage, the heart-riveted kindliness of consanguinity, gradually wither and perish in the lapse of a few generations. All the elements which form the basis of that sympathy between the individual and his country are dissolved.
Long before the Declaration of Independence the great mass of the People of America and of the People of Britain, had become total strangers to each other. The people of America were known to the people of Britain only by the transactions of trade; by shipments of lumber and flaxseed, indigo and tobacco. They were known to the government only by half a dozen colonial agents, humble, and often spurned suitors at the fee t of power, and by royal governors, minions of patronage, sent, from the footstool of a throne beyond the seas, to rule a people of whom they knew nothing; as if an inhabitant of the moon should descend to give laws to the dwellers upon earth. Here and there, a man of letters and a statesman, conversant with all history, knew something of the colonies, as he knew something of Cochin-China and Japan. Yet even the prime minister of England, urging upon his omnipotent Parliament laws for grinding the colonies to submission, could talk, without amazing or diverting his hearers, of the Island of Virginia: even Edmund Burke, a man of more ethereal mind, apologizing to the people of Bristol for the offence of sympathizing with the distresses of our country, ravaged by the fire and sword of Britons, asked indulgence for his feelings on the score of general humanity, and expressly declared that the Americans were a nation utter strangers to him, and among whom he was not sure of having a single acquaintance. The sympathies therefore most essential to the communion of country were, between the British and American people, extinct. Those most indispensable to the just relation between sovereign and subject, had never existed and could not exist between the British Government and the America People. The connexion was unnatural; and it was in the moral order, no less than in the positive decrees, of Providence, that it should be dissolved.
Yet, Fellow-Citizens, these are not the causes of the separation assigned in the paper which I am about to read. The connexion between different portions of the same people, and between a people and their government, is a connexion of duties as well as of rights. In the long conflict of twelve years which had preceded and led to the Declaration of Independence, our fathers had been not less faithful to their duties, than tenacious of their rights. Their resistance had not been rebellion. It was not a restive and ungovernable spirit of ambition bursting from the bonds of colonial subjection, it was the deep and wounded sense of successive wrongs, upon which complaint had been only answered by aggravation, and petition repelled with contumely, which had driven them to their last stand upon the adamantine rock of human rights.
It was then, fifteen months after the blood of Lexington and Bunker’s Hill, after Charlestown and Falmouth, fired by British hands, were but heaps of ashes, after the ear of the adder had been turned to two successive supplications to the throne; after two successive appeals to the people of Britain, as Friends, Countrymen, and Brethren, to which no responsive voice of sympathetic tenderness had been returned—
Nought but the noise of drums and timbrels loud,
Their children’s cries unheard that passed thro’ fire
To the grim idol.
Then it was, that the Thirteen United Colonies of North America, by their delegates in Congress assembled, exercising the first act of sovereignty by right ever inherent in the people, but never to be resorted to, save at the awful crisis when civil society is solved into its first elements, declared themselves free and independent States, and two days afterwards, in justification of that act, issued this Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776.
The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.
WHEN, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident—that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such for, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness, Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security, Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present ki