John Adams's Inaugural Address (1797) — Full Reading | The Open Book Reads

John Adams's inaugural address, given in Philadelphia on March 4, 1797, read aloud in full with the text on screen. This was the first time the American presidency passed from one person to another. George Washington had decided not to serve a third term. On a fair Saturday, his vice president, John Adams, walked into the crowded House chamber of Congress Hall to take the oath, and Washington sat among the audience as a private citizen. Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth swore Adams in, the first time a Chief Justice administered the presidential oath. That morning, in the Senate chamber upstairs, Thomas Jefferson had been sworn in as vice president. Under the original rules, the runner-up in the election took that office, so the new president and vice president came from opposing camps. Adams was sixty-one, and few people had done more to bring the country into being. He had pressed for independence in the Continental Congress and served on the committee that drafted the Declaration. He had spent the war years and after as a diplomat in France, the Netherlands and Britain. He was abroad when the Constitution was written, and in this address he describes reading it there "with great satisfaction, as the result of good heads prompted by good hearts." He then spent eight years as Washington's vice president. The speech looks back over the country's short history, from the Revolution through the weak Articles of Confederation to the new Constitution. It pays tribute, without naming him, to the man leaving office. At its center is one of the longest sentences in any American speech, more than seven hundred words. In it Adams lists, one clause at a time, the commitments he means to keep: to the Constitution, to the rights of the states, to education, to fair dealing with Native nations, to neutrality among the powers of Europe, and to his "personal esteem for the French nation" at a moment when relations with France were growing strained. It ends with a prayer for the nation's future. Reading it today, the most striking thing may be the ordinariness of the event it marks. One elected leader stepped aside, and another stepped in, with no army and no crisis. That habit started here. This video uses the text as printed in Project Gutenberg's collection of presidential inaugural addresses. It opens with a short introduction written for this edition, and every word appears on screen as it is read, alongside portraits by John Trumbull and other period artwork. Chapters 0:00 Welcome 1:31 John Adams · March 4, 1797: Inaugural Address 17:56 Thank you for listening ── About this video ── Text: John Adams, Inaugural Address (1797), from Project Gutenberg eBook 925. Public domain in the United States (a work of the U.S. government, and published before 1931). This channel is not affiliated with or endorsed by Project Gutenberg. Narration: synthetic (text-to-speech) voice. The introduction is original to The Open Book. Images: portraits by John Trumbull and other period artwork, and illustrations created for this edition. Texts read on this channel are in the U.S. public domain and presented for educational and cultural purposes. Subscribe and keep the page turning. Which line stayed with you? Tell us in the comments, along with the book you'd like to hear next. #JohnAdams #InauguralAddress #TheOpenBookReads