John Quincy Adams, "Orations"



"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