Town Hall Meeting | John Quincy Adams

Friends, neighbors, fellow citizens 

 I am John Quincy Adams. Some of you know me as the sixth President of these United States. Others know me better as the old man in the House of Representatives who will not sit down and will not be quiet. I was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1767, the son of John and Abigail Adams. I was raised watching my father help build a nation on the promise that all men are created equal. I have spent my life trying to hold this country to that promise and I have watched it break that promise for far too many of its people.

I do not come before you tonight as a man untested by this question. In 1841, at seventy-three years of age, I stood before the Supreme Court of the United States to argue for the freedom of fifty-three Africans men and women who had been seized illegally, sold into bondage, and who fought for their own liberty aboard the ship Amistad. Lawyers half my age advised me it was a fool's errand. I took the case regardless, because I believed then, as I believe now, that no law of nations and no law of man can make a human being into property.

The Court ruled in the captives' favor. When the verdict came, I wrote to my co-counsel that the captives were free, and I told him I wrote to him in great joy. That joy has never left me. Nor has my conviction. In the years since, I have kept a private diary, and in it I confessed something I will confess to you tonight: I am an old man, my handshakes, my eyesight dims, and yet my conscience presses me on. My conscience presses me on those are my own words, written in the thick of this struggle, and they remain true today.

Consider what is asked of you, here, in this hall. Not to take up arms. Not to march into danger. Only to say, plainly, that slavery is a wrong which this Republic cannot carry forever without breaking beneath its weight. I have sat in the halls of Congress and watched my colleagues refuse even to let the word "slavery" be spoken on the floor, gagging petition after petition sent by free citizens exercising their plain constitutional right. I fought that gag rule for years, session after session, because a nation that will not permit its own citizens to petition against bondage has already surrendered a piece of its soul.

Some will tell you this is not your affair that it belongs to statesmen, to lawyers, to men in Washington. I tell you the opposite. The Declaration our fathers signed did not say all men are created equal only in the halls of government. It said it plainly, for every household, every town, every meeting such as this one. If that document means anything, it cannot coexist forever with the ownership of one man by another.

I do not ask you to hate your neighbor who disagrees. I ask you to look honestly at what slavery is: the permanent, total, and hereditary bondage of human beings, defended not by justice but by habit and by profit. I have given the whole of my long life, in one office after another, trying to narrow the gap between what this nation claims to believe and what it actually practices. I am asking you, tonight, to help me close it further.

Thank you.

AI DISCLOSURE: For this AI-assisted assignment, I used Claude AI to do historical research on my topic. After prompting the tool to do research based only on academic and other high-quality sources, I asked Claude to shape the material in the form of a script for an oral presentation of four minutes. I then asked Claude to shape the material in the form of a blog post of between 500 and 600 words. I edited the AI output for readability. I also policed the linked sources for quality control. To the blog post, I added visual elements and links to sources. I also made sure the paragraphs were short and in a professional style.