Here is the definition of an assault, which is a sufficient provocation to soften killing down to manslaughter:—­

(1 Hawkins, ch. 31, section 36):  “Neither can he be thought guilty of a greater crime than manslaughter, who, finding a man in bed with his wife, or being actually struck by him, or pulled by the nose or filliped upon the forehead, immediately kills him, or in the defense of his person from an unlawful arrest, or in the defense of his house from those who, claiming a title to it, attempt forcibly to enter it, and to that purpose shoot at it,” etc.

Every snowball, oyster shell, cake of ice, or bit of cinder, that was thrown that night at the sentinel, was an assault upon him; every one that was thrown at the party of soldiers was an assault upon them, whether it hit any of them or not.  I am guilty of an assault if I present a gun at any person; and if I insult him in that manner and he shoots me, it is but manslaughter.

(Foster. 295, 396):  “To what I have offered with regard to sudden rencounters let me add, that the blood already too much heated, kindleth afresh at every pass or blow.  And in the tumult of the passions, in which the mere instinct of self-preservation has no inconsiderable share, the voice of reason is not heard; and therefore the law, in condescension to the infirmities of flesh and blood, doth extenuate the offense.”

Insolent, scurrilous, or slanderous language, when it precedes an assault, aggravates it.

(Foster, 316):  “We all know that words of reproach, how grating and offensive soever, are in the eye of the law no provocation in the case of voluntary homicide:  and yet every man who hath considered the human frame, or but attended to the workings of his own heart knoweth that affronts of that kind pierce deeper and stimulate in the veins more effectually than a slight injury done to a third person, though under the color of justice, possibly can.”

I produce this to show the assault in this case was aggravated by the scurrilous language which preceded it.  Such words of reproach stimulate in the veins and exasperate the mind, and no doubt if an assault and battery succeeds them, killing under such provocation is softened to manslaughter, but killing without such provocation makes it murder.

 End of the first day’s speech

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS (1767-1848)

No other American President, not even Thomas Jefferson, has equaled John Quincy Adams in literary accomplishments.  His orations and public speeches will be found to stand for a tradition of painstaking, scholastic finish hardly to be found elsewhere in American orations, and certainly not among the speeches of any other President.  As a result of the pains he took with them, they belong rather to literature than to politics, and it is possible that they will not be generally appreciated at their real worth for several generations