John Quincy Adams’s 1821 Fourth of July Address 

By Daniel McCarthy

John Quincy Adams’ 1821 Fourth of July address has had a long legacy. It has become a touchstone in debates about foreign policy to this day, thanks to Adams’ ringing assertion that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”  

Adams was the U.S. secretary of state at the time, and he would soon help President James Monroe draft what we now call the Monroe Doctrine. Adams was expected to be a presidential contender in 1824—and he not only was a candidate, he won, following his father’s footsteps to the highest office in the land. 

When a committee of citizens in Washington, D.C., invited Adams to give an Independence Day speech in 1821, they knew his remarks would be significant for the whole country. Like the Declaration of Independence itself, however, Adams’ comments were directed to the world as well as his fellow Americans.  

The Napoleonic Wars had ended only a few years earlier, and they had been, in effect, a world war. Even America had become involved—the War of 1812 was part of the wider conflict. And as happened after World War II, in the early 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars were followed by a kind of Cold War. The French Revolution and Napoleon had tried to plunge all of Europe into revolution for liberté, égalité, and fraternité.  

France was defeated, but the revolution’s ideals were not, and the victorious traditional powers of Europe now struggled to prevent revolution from erupting anew. Prussia, Russia, and Austria formed the Holy Alliance against revolutionary movements, and many of Europe’s Christian powers even feared the rebellion of Greeks against the rule of the Ottoman Empire would inflame radical causes elsewhere. 

Wasn’t America also a revolutionary republic that had fought to win its independence from the British Empire? In Britain itself, there was divided opinion about revolutionary movements, with liberal Whigs tending to sympathize with independence efforts everywhere. They saw the Holy Alliance as an ideological, geopolitical, and indeed spiritual enemy to be defeated in a cold war to advance liberalism, democracy, human rights, and enlightenment. The Catholic Church and hereditary monarchy were evils that held back human progress, they firmly believed. 

British liberals accused Americans of hypocrisy. Our nation was founded in a revolution, and the Declaration of Independence set out universal ideals that we now stood accused of doing nothing to support. The Whigs who sympathized with the French Revolution’s ideals wanted the U.S. and Britain to work together in the 19th century to promote movements for liberalism and independence. This, they insisted, was America’s duty to its own ideals, as they had been set out in the Declaration. Many Americans agreed with this—just as many had been supportive of the French Revolution. 

John Quincy Adams was the descendant of Massachusetts Puritans. He had no love for the Catholic Church. His father had been a driving force behind American independence. When other leaders in the Continental Congress still sought reconciliation with the king, John Adams insisted that independence was the right and necessary path. And despite what his sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, Thomas Jefferson would later say, John Adams was no monarchist. Neither was his son.  

John Quincy Adams’ 1821 speech on the Declaration makes his principles clear: Traditional monarchy was founded in unjust conquest, and only after the Protestant Reformation did a proper understanding of liberty in matters of conscience and religion arise, which subsequently led to a reformation in the moral principles of politics as well.  

For Secretary Adams, that was the enduring significance of the Declaration of Independence: “It was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government.  … It announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the unalterable sovereignty of the people. It proved that the social compact was no figment of the imagination; but a real, solid, and sacred bond of the social union.”  

Adams even appropriated the language of Europe’s counterrevolutionaries in support of the declaration: “In the reperusal and hearing of this instrument,” Adams said, referring to the declaration, we “renew the genuine Holy Alliance of its principles.” 

John Quincy Adams was unwilling to yield an inch to America’s liberal critics overseas—his speech asserted that America was indeed the champion of an idea, and even an idea of freedom the critics might recognize. Yet they were wrong to think they understood that idea better than Americans themselves did.  

Adams knew that what rightly followed from the declaration’s principles of self-government was not endless intervention in the affairs of other nations but rather the opposite. For Adams, history was a tale of the opposition between “liberty and force,” and America was the first nation in history to show that liberty could be the basis of political order. To get involved in the inveterate ideological and territorial wars of Europe and the rest of the world would transform America from a free and peaceful country into just another instrument of force.  

“By once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence,” Adams warned, America “would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”  

What is most important, according to Adams, is not whether there is a good cause at stake in a foreign conflict, but rather the principle that a free nation like America is not preoccupied with the use of force. Wars and armies were what gave rise to kings and servitude. Adams was no pacifist, nor even a strict non-interventionist. He had no illusions about removing force from statecraft and the nature of the state itself. But he was vigilant lest the attempt to use force for good but not strictly necessary ends should lead back to the conditions of the past.  

His concern was not only about practical effects but above all about losing the moral object of our independence. That would be a loss to humanity, as the example of a state not defined by war and power was sacrificed to the dream of doing good through the instruments of empire. 

There is much more in Adams’ 1821 Fourth of July address that speaks to questions of our time and of all time. Adams combines ideas from Cicero, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith to explore how natural sympathies bind political societies together.  

“It is a common Government,” says Adams, meaning common justice and political association, “that constitutes our Country. But in THAT association, all the sympathies of domestic life and kindred blood, all the moral ligatures of friendship and of neighborhood, are combined with that instinctive and mysterious context between man and physical nature, which binds the first perceptions of childhood in a chain of sympathy with the last gasp of expiring age, to the spot of our nativity.”  

America was more than just an idea—the idea had to be given substance by a people naturally joined together as families, friends, and inhabitants of a shared land. In the presence of such bonds, even a lack of freedom might be tolerable, as Americans tolerated more than a century of existence as Britain’s colonists. Yet the very distance between Britain and America attenuated those natural connections to the mother country, while Americans formed closer bonds with one another in that land that was their own:  

Long before the Declaration of Independence, the great mass of the people of America and the people of Britain had become total strangers to each other. The people of America were known to the people of Britain only through the transactions of trade. … The sympathies most essential to the communion of country were, between the British and the American people, extinct. 

There is a lesson here for those who today think a nation can be merely an economy, a regulatory domain within which strangers buy and sell from one another.  

John Quincy Adams’ 1821 Fourth of July address is an American classic for all the reasons it’s well-remembered, but for more many more, too. It deserves to be read and revisited as often as the Declaration of Independence itself is. 

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and a columnist for The Spectator and Creators Syndicate.