The profound connection between July 4 and December 25.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence, it is incumbent on Americans to reflect diligently about the enduring meaning of that august document that set us on the path of becoming a truly free, independent, and self-governing people and nation. That task should be considerably aided by the recent publication of An Oration: John Quincy Adams’s Christian America, a beautifully designed volume that reproduces a 68-page speech that a seventy-year-old Adams delivered in Newburyport, Massachusetts on July 4, 1837. Adams’s remarkable speech is accompanied by expert commentary from the distinguished political theorist William B. Allen and American Policy Roundtable Chairman David Zanotti. This volume, published by American Policy Roundtable, provides nothing less than an intellectual feast for those who want to reflect seriously about what it means to be an American in this our nation’s Semiquincentennial year.
Adams’s Fourth of July oration is a particularly eloquent and forceful speech that adumbrates the relationship between liberal America and Christian America, and thus between two vitally important dates on the American calendar: July 4th and December 25th. These mark the beginning of the American project as a free and independent nation, and its status as the work of an essentially Christian people indebted as all Western peoples are to the coming of the “Savior” Christ Jesus into the world. Where some see a radical break between Christian and liberal civilization, between Christian wisdom and Enlightenment principles, Adams discerns broad continuity underlying the undeniable “newness” of the American experiment in republican self-government.
His approach is richly dialectical, melding and doing justice to the new and the old, the continuity of Western civilization and what is bold and daring in the American approach to self-government and ordered liberty. He gives no support or succor to those who wish to identify American liberty with radical secularism or an impious and irresponsible “liberation” from moral restraints and our civilized inheritance as a Christian people. At the same time, Adams has little or no sympathy for the political orders of old Europe, the so-called Old Regime, that stifled the natural and necessary grounding of free and decent political life in the consent of the governed. These regimes were not despotic per se, but they did not allow political freedom, or civil and religious liberty, to flourish. As we shall see, Adams’s perspective is at once conservative and liberal, and at times even displays a confidence in the “progress” of the human race that borders on the utopian and that is seemingly at odds with some of his own core principles and presuppositions.
The Moral Underpinnings of the Declaration
After providing an admirably concise and accurate account of the “object” of the Declaration (i.e. to dissolve the political bonds that hitherto connected the newly “free and independent States” to Great Britain; to proclaim “the separate and equal station” of the United States to which the “Laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God, entitled them”; and to declare forthrightly the reasons and causes for this assertion of independence that “a decent respect for the opinions of Mankind” requires), Quincy Adams proceeds to clarify the moral underpinnings of the great Declaration. In doing so, he insists that the great oppressor of the American people was the British parliament itself, with its unlimited and unrestrained sense of its own sovereignty, and not King George III himself, who was hardly an exemplar of “personal tyranny.” As a king, Adams tells us, George III’s “intentions were good.” He acted generously towards his own people and his disposition was “benevolent” and his “integrity unsullied.”
Here we get to the nub of the matter. While rooting legitimate governance in the free consent of the government, the younger Adams vehemently denied “the principle that sovereign power in human Government is in its nature unlimited.” The British incoherently combined a faith in the unlimited sovereignty of parliament and Crown with the liberal or constitutional “principle that property can lawfully be taxed only with the consent of the owner.” This contradiction sullied English constitutionalism and led Americans to defend their natural rights against willful or unlimited claims of sovereign authority.
The American patriots declared themselves to be one free and independent people, united as one independent nation despite their status as “free and independent states” within a broader federal Union. That Union was imperfectly achieved by the post-revolutionary Articles of Confederation (whose intrinsic weaknesses Adams ably delineates), and was later much more perfectly achieved by the Federal Constitution of 1787. Adams remarks that If one colony seceded from the rest, “she could have maintained neither her independence nor her freedom.” Citing Isaiah 66:8, Adams declares that in 1776 a new nation was “born at once,” instantaneously, so to speak. This “great and solemn event” must be pondered and cherished, Adams tells us. America was never intended to be a loose confederacy—her founding principles would not allow for that. There exists “a right of revolution” when fundamental rights are denied, yes, (although that right must be prudently—and thus rarely exercised) but no “right to secede” at will. This is a distinction that the Confederates of 1861-1865 would fail to honor.
A Christian People
But Adams, who in the “Letters to Publicola” (1791) had forcefully defended his father John Adams’s moral and political integrity against the revolutionary assaults of Thomas Paine (with his initially blind adherence to the French Revolution)—rooted the founding of the United States in what I have called the continuity of Western civilization. 1776 was no “Year Zero” and entailed no summary rejection of the Christian character of that civilization. Quite the contrary. In the 1837 oration, Adams fils proclaims in no uncertain terms that “the Declaration of Independence announced the One People, assuming their station among the powers of the earth, as a civilized, religious, and Christian people, acknowledging themselves bound by the obligations, and claiming the rights to which they were entitled by the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”
Americans, he wrote, were deeply indebted to “the laws of humanity and mutual benevolence taught in the Gospel of Christ.” The broadly Christian character of the American people—and the European civilization of which it was an offspring—could only be forgotten at our own peril. Unlike many monarchs of old, and even more unlike the French Revolutionaries who unleashed terror and arbitrary government in the name of the absolute sovereignty of the people, the American Founders, drawing on a deep and abiding Christian conviction, rejected any idea of sovereignty that “was held to be unlimited and illimitable.” They adamantly opposed the sacrilegious emancipation of the human will from all sacred limits and restraints.
Adams beautifully articulated the moral ground of the American position: “A moral Ruler of the universe, the Governor and controller of all human power is the only unlimited sovereign acknowledged by the Declaration of Independence,” precisely because that moral Ruler’s will is inseparable from His wisdom and benevolence. Adams makes the most radical of claims: the American Founders rejected pure sovereignty, the self-sovereignty or self-assertion of a particular people or the human race as a whole, because such claims usurped the benign sovereignty of God. Political authorities, however legitimately constituted, are always under the judgment of God, as Abraham Lincoln would later insist in his 1865 Second Inaugural. They have “only the power to do all that may be done of right.” We now have a much better sense why Adams so adamantly rejected any moral identification of the American and French Revolutions. He would write in 1800 that they were as different as “right and wrong.” Adams thus refused to countenance what was later called “totalitarian democracy” in any of its forms.
“The Gangrene of Slavery”
In his July 4, 1837 oration, Adams is most compelling when he analyzes what he so suggestively calls the “infection” of the American Republic by “the gangrene of slavery.” He notes the fact that Jefferson believed that chattel slavery was wrong and was “fated” to die, and highlights the fact that in his Final Will and Testament, the great Washington freed his slaves and provided for their education and support. He establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt “the inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of the Independence,” a fact “seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and unalterable conviction, than by the author of the Declaration himself.” About all this Adams is right.
But if Jefferson later claimed that the peculiar institution was condemned by history and fate, by the broad direction of modern societies, John Quincy Adams thunderously declared that its condemnation was written less in the Book of Fate than in the very “Laws of Nature and Nature God.” Like Lincoln after him, he saw racial slavery as a terrible affront against both God and the natural order of things. In the 1837 oration, Adams exposes the sophistries underlying “pro-slavery theology” as Lincoln would later call it. Its proponents twisted Scriptures to their own purposes, sanctifying the grave cruelties of slavery, and succumbing to the lie “that colour operates as a forfeiture of the rights of human nature; that a dark skin turns a man into chattel; that crispy hair transforms a human being into a four-footed beast.”
A former diplomat, secretary of state and president who later served nine consecutive terms in Congress (his final year there serving alongside Lincoln), Adams fought the slave party with utmost determination and the most compelling moral, historical, political, and religious arguments. He appealed to the arguments of natural and political right at the core of the Declaration of Independence. He even successfully defended before the Supreme Court the cause of Mende Africans who fought for their freedom aboard the slave ship La Amistad in 1839. After Adams’s impressive eight-hour argument before the Court, marked by a combination of steely moral purpose, historical fact, and subdued passion, Quincy Adams won these African slaves their freedom. In gratitude, they rewarded him with a Bible—since the Bible lay at the foundation of the argument for a shared human dignity rooted in the providential care of the Creator of all.
A Concluding Appeal to Prophecy
This moving and compelling speech culminates on an anti-slavery crescendo that reaches elevated if somewhat apocalyptic heights that are rather in tension with Quincy Adams’s usual austerity and steadiness of moral purpose. He invokes the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah which were confirmed by the coming of the Savior Christ Jesus into the world (as argued in Luke’s Gospel) and would be completed by the abolition of slavery and war in accord with the “standard maxims of Christian benevolence and mercy, always animated with the community of principles promulgated by the Gospel.”
In the final section of the oration, Adams comes close to identifying Christianity mainly or exclusively with the rise of gentleness and humanitarianism in the modern world. He is silent about countervailing tendencies or evidence to the contrary. As Russell Kirk suggests in his classic 1953 work The Conservative Mind, the usually sober Adams approaches succumbing to belief in a most improbable “human perfectibility.” Of course, noble efforts to put an end to the “gangrene of slavery,” such as John Quincy Adams’s and Lincoln’s, do not depend on eschatological hopes that nations “shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4), a prophecy appealed to by Adams. Is human perfectibility in this sinful and fallen world really the consummation of history and the effectual truth of the Savior’s message? We have very good reasons to oppose grave evils such as slavery without believing that evil can be eradicated from this world.
This fundamental reservation aside, John Quincy Adams’s oration illumines America as a “Christian nation” like no other document before or after it. In their rich and inspired commentary on the oration, Allen and Zanotti rightly remark that Quincy Adams profoundly demonstrates what is “Christian” about the American proposition and provided a civilized and inspiring testimony that the human race would be better off “without slavery and war.” In his 1837 appeal to the American people, Adams begins by invoking the moral and political truths of the Declaration of Independence and ends by drawing upon the prophetic insights of Isaiah and Luke. What a profound exercise in liberal and civic education, as pertinent today as in the summer of 1837, as well as a welcome and salutary reminder of what thoughtful and noble statesmanship entails.
Daniel J. Mahoney is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a senior visiting fellow at Hillsdale College, and professor emeritus at Assumption University. His latest book is The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now, published by Encounter Books in 2025.