John Quincy Adams Toasts William Penn and His City of Brotherly Love, in Very Rare Written Remarks as President

His toast: “The Land of William Penn, and his Great Town, the City of brotherly love.”

General Lafayette’s well-received visit to Philadelphia in 1824 harkened the minds of the people back to the days almost fifty years previous to the American Revolution. The renewed historical interest generated by that visit was an important moment in the awakening of Philadelphians’ minds to its own historic past. Late in 1824 the Society for the Commemoration of the Landing of William Penn was organized, and it became known as the Penn Society. The Penn Society would in time succeed in saving the memory of Penn’s Treaty. The meeting that set up the Penn Society was also the genesis of the founding of the the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

The purpose of the Penn Society was “to portray the character, and perpetuate just and grateful recollections of the services of the illustrious lawgiver (William Penn) and his companions.” This generous purpose, it was believed, could be carried into effect, by the annual delivery of discourses – “by preserving representations of scenes of great interest; and also by constructing monuments at various points, distinguished by events that shed luster over our early annals.”

The Penn Society’s inaugural meeting, on November 4, 1824, was a sumptuous banquet held at the house in Letitia Court that was once the home of William Penn himself. The Society’s purpose that night was to commemorate “Penn’s landing on the American shore” in 1682, and to honor “the memory of his virtue.” The Penn Society dinner became an annual event and in 1825, Charles Jared Ingersoll delivered an address to a group that included President John Quincy Adams. Adams received a complimentary relic box made from the Treaty Tree and it is said that much to the dismay of the Society, Adams used the relic as a snuffbox.

Autograph remarks, Philadelphia, October 24, 1825, reported in the newspapers and periodicals of the era, in response to presentation to him of the relic box. “Gentlemen: I pray you to accept my thanks for the pleasure I have enjoyed in witnessing the celebration, and partaking in the festivities of this day – and for the notice with which you have just honored me; rendered doubly dear to me by the revolutionary lips from which it proceeded, and for the flattering sentiments by which it was accompanied. I will not trespass upon your time, nor encroach upon topics fresh in your minds from the touches of a master’s hand, in the discourse which we have this day heard, but content myself with proposing to you for a toast: ‘The Land of William Penn, and his Great Town, the City of brotherly love.’”