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157 chapter four The Contract of Blood T he date was July 4, 1793, and, as John Adams had hoped in 1776, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence was “solemnized with pomp and parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.”1 Independence Day was the holiday in the early Republic, especially in Boston, the city that launched a young Adams into political prominence. An oil-and-water amalgamation of choreographed pageantry and world-turned-upsidedown reverie, Boston’s Fourth of July celebrations were not for the faint of heart.2 This was not the nice but banal world of backyard barbeques, homemade ice cream, and community fireworks; Bostonians sped right past solemnization into joyous, drunken celebration. The fireworks were as likely to follow a strong left to the head as they were a military salute, and as party politics became the accepted vehicle of American politics, Federalists and Republicans staged competing celebrations in 158 Chapter Four a decades-long battle for control of the hearts and minds of Bostonians. This particular day opened and closed with the discharge of cannon; in between, the Boston Gazette noted simply, the holiday “was celebrated with the greatest hilarity and good-humour, by every class of citizens.”3 One wonders about the revelry hiding behind this rather parsimonious description, but given Boston’s reputation for partying hard, we can be sure that everyone had a good time. Amidst the pomp and parade, the shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations of the day, the keynote speaker at Boston’s Faneuil Hall was Adams’s son, John Quincy, a gifted orator who would later become the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. The younger Adams understood the ins and outs of this genre of speaking as well as anyone alive, and he translated his almost encyclopedic knowledge of rhetorical theory into a speech that was met with the hearty huzzahs of his ebullient audience. According to the Boston Gazette, the speech was the best of its kind ever given. This meant something very specific in the early Republic—for this particular rhetorical situation called on the orator to turn the rostrum into a podium, and the town hall into a schoolroom. For John Quincy Adams and many others, the Fourth of July was an excellent reason to celebrate, but an even better opportunity for civic education. In the early Republic, the Fourth of July stage was reserved for educated elites and honored members of the community—in short, for the clergy, educators, and politicians who had the social capital and influence to alter how Americans imagined their relationship to the nation. These speeches are rhetorically interesting, then, not because they reveal how Americans conceptualized patriotism in their day—as one prominent historian has written—but because they reveal how patriotism was prescribed by the powerful.4 On the Fourth of July, elites taught the masses what it meant to be an American in the post-Revolutionary age. Rhetoric is an imaginative art, and this is nowhere more apparent in early Fourth of July addresses. Generally, these speeches recounted stories of heroism gone by and articulated a vision of the coming days of milk and honey. Tying the past to the future was the human agent. The future was pure potential that could not be reached but through the present, and unless individuals acted to make it so. The alternative The Contract of Blood 159 futures dreamed up by the orator demanded that the audience reform their behaviors. In his Harvard lectures on rhetoric, Adams pointed to Fourth of July addresses as the best example of epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and blame, telling his students that the goal of epideictic “is to point the finger of admiration or scorn; to deal out the mead of honor and of shame.” “Invective is not one of the pleasing functions of oratory; nor is it her amiable aspect. But she is charged with a sting, as well as with honey,” he continued. “Her terrors are as potent, as her charms; as the same omnipotent hand is manifested by the blasting volley of thunder, as by the genial radiance of the sun.”5 By providing models for an audience to emulate and eschew, and by delineating the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behavior, Adams argued that the “omnipotent hand” of the epideictic...

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