Orations

Orations collects the speeches of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), the sixth President of the United States, and is a public-domain text released by Project Gutenberg (eBook #896). The volume opens with "The Jubilee of the Constitution," an address delivered on April 30, 1839, at the annual meeting of the New-York Historical Society, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Washington's inauguration as first President on April 30, 1789, and of the coming into effect of the federal Constitution. In solemn and ornate rhetoric, Adams discusses the origins of the Union, the meaning of the Constitution, and the mission of the federal republic, presenting the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the Constitution as a continuous intellectual lineage; he invokes the hardships of his forebears' pioneering and the colonies' tradition of pursuing liberty, stressing how the "fire of freedom" gathered in North America into a system of government. The book exemplifies the nineteenth-century American public oration: long sentences, dense allusions, and historical narrative in the service of civic education, structurally continuous with the classical rhetorical tradition (such as the funeral and political orations of ancient Athens). It should be noted that "Orations" is an extremely common title in Western letters; Lysias and Demosthenes in ancient Greece, Cicero in Rome, and modern statesmen have all had collections under that name. This entry follows the version information given for this collection and points to Adams's volume; readers searching for or citing it should verify the author and specific contents to avoid confusion with other books of the same title. This collection contains the electronic English text only, without Chinese translation or notes.