The Project Gutenberg EBook of Orations, by John Quincy Adams

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Title: Orations

Author: John Quincy Adams

Posting Date: August 2, 2008 [EBook #896]
Release Date: April, 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORATIONS ***

Produced by Anthony J. Adam

"ORATIONS"

By John Quincy Adams

"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