From John Quincy Adams: Speeches & Writings
Few of the men who were until recently conventionally called the Founding Fathers themselves had sons of an age and in a position to possibly play a public role in the new nation. John Adams, with three college-age sons in 1787, was an exception. It is perhaps not surprising then that his eldest son’s Harvard graduation oration should have attracted attention. Harvard’s annual commencement was always a key event in the civic calendar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with public officials, often including the governor, in attendance.
Such was the case on July 18, 1787, when a twenty-year-old John Quincy Adams delivered his oration. Also present was the Reverend Jeremy Belknap, Harvard Class of 1762, newly installed as the pastor at Boston’s Long Lane (Federal Street) Church. A liberal Unitarian—a sect then just emerging—Belknap was also a highly regarded historian and man of letters. (He would go on to cofound the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1791.)
Impressed by Adams’s oration, Belknap proposed that it be published in the Columbian Magazine, a Philadelphia monthly to which Belknap was a contributor. “Highly honored” by the proposal, Adams sent Belknap a copy of the oration on July 30, though he requested that it be published anonymously and in conjunction with a classmate’s poem, lest it “be considered a mark of presumption in me to assume a distinction, which others, much more meritorious, had declined through modesty.” Belknap, replying on August 3, urged Adams to consent to publication without the poem (a copy of which he had trouble locating) and under his name, arguing that “the friends of Liberty and Virtue will have the farther Satisfaction to see the features of the Parent in the Son,” and that the “Country will have a pledge of a succession of abilities in the same Family still to aid her Cause and espouse her Interest.”
Adams relented in a letter to Belknap three days later, and in his diary wrote that “I have ventured upon a step, which perhaps some persons may censure; but as the circumstances are I know not what else to do. . . .”
