IN THE AFTERMATH OF Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress convened on May 10, 1775. By this time royal government in several colonies had collapsed and the distant king in England was unresponsive to the Congress’s petition asking for a redress of the colonists’ grievances. Without any central authority to hold the colonies together, the Congress necessarily had to become a replacement for the far-off Crown. Which is why it assumed an authority far beyond what the colonists had conceded to Parliament. As a substitute for the Crown, it began doing all the things that the king had done in the colonies, from regulating Indian affairs to borrowing money and directing the army. The confusion and workload of government often overwhelmed the several dozen delegates from the colonies who made up the Congress. Because it was the entire central government for the colonies, blending legislative, executive, and judicial functions, the members of Congress ended up deciding not only major issues of policy but also the most mundane matters of administration, including whether to pay the bill submitted by a doorkeeper for his services. With only a handful of clerks to help the delegates, it is amazing that anything got done.
Adams was much busier in this Congress than he had been in the First Continental Congress. With actual fighting having broken out, the stakes were higher and the delegates took their responsibilities much more seriously than they had earlier, entertaining and feasting much less than they had in the fall of 1774. The congressional sessions were longer and the delegates were working harder, with Adams working the hardest of all. He was soon serving on two dozen committees and chairing many of them. “Such a vast Multitude of Objects, civil, political, commercial and military, press and crowd upon Us so fast,” he told his friend James Warren after several weeks of meetings, “that We know not what to do first.”1
From Monday through Saturday Adams met in committees from seven to ten o’clock in the morning; then he participated in the debates in the full Congress from ten o’clock until the late afternoon, when the delegates broke for dinner. After dinner there were more committee meetings that went on from six until ten at night. For fear of British agents and spies, everything had to be done in secrecy, which added to the strain. Since each colony had only one vote, some delegates could take time off. Adams was not one of them.
At first Jefferson was not one of Virginia’s seven delegates. But when Peyton Randolph had to return from Philadelphia, the thirty-two-year-old Jefferson was belatedly selected to be one of the colony’s congressional representatives. Wealthier than many of the delegates, Jefferson spared no expense in traveling to Philadelphia, arriving with four horses. He took up luxurious quarters that were separated from the other delegates. By the time he arrived, the Congress had been in session for six weeks.
Unlike Adams, who seemed constantly on his feet, Jefferson remained silent in the public sessions. Adams later recalled that the whole time he sat with Jefferson in the Congress, “I never heard him utter three Sentences together.” Jefferson was, however, very effective in committees and small groups, Adams recalled. He came to the Congress with “a reputation for literature, science, and a happy talent at composition”; indeed, the delegates passed Jefferson’s writings about and praised their “peculiar felicity of expression.”2
Adams learned of Jefferson’s radical views in conversations and committees. Jefferson turned out to be “so prompt, frank, explicit and decisive,” recalled Adams, even more so than his firebrand cousin Samuel Adams, “that he soon seized upon my heart.”3 Eight years older than Jefferson, Adams regarded the Virginian as his protégé, and Jefferson tended to assume that role. They complemented each other. Adams was often irascible and not comfortable in company, and was likely to erupt with tactless remarks. In the Congress he often resorted to sarcasm and satire to put down his opponents.4 By contrast, Jefferson was always amiable and acutely sensitive to the feelings of whomever he was speaking with or writing to. He always went out of his way not to offend. His politeness was important to his success, but it was also a source of some mistrust.
Jefferson was certainly aware that many of the congressional delegates were lukewarm about independence. Even Adams realized that he had to curb his enthusiasm for independence if he was eventually to bring along the other delegates. He knew that the colonies were “not yet ripe” for such measures as forming a confederation and opening America’s ports to all nations. “America,” he said, “is a great unwieldy Body. Its Progress must be slow. It is like a large Fleet sailing under Convoy. The fleetest Sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest.”5
Although Jefferson had been immediately asked to join John Dickinson in revising an earlier version of a Declaration on the Necessity of Taking Up Arms, he realized that he and Dickinson could not be as severe and radical in this document as he had been in his Summary View. Hence the declaration adopted by Congress on July 6, 1775, ended up assuring all the British subjects throughout the empire “that we mean not to dissolve that Union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored.”6
Adams was one of the members who pushed the Congress to take the boldest stand. He repeatedly had to contend with the eloquence of the “Pennsylvania Farmer,” John Dickinson, whom Adams in a letter captured and published by the British had called a “piddling Genius” who had “given a silly Cast to our whole Doings.”7 Dickinson had been one of the leading patriots in the late 1760s, but by 1775 he warned his colleagues that breaking from the British empire would cause the colonies to bleed from every vein.
Publicly both Jefferson and Adams had to suggest that they hoped for a restoration of the imperial relationship as long as American rights were fully acknowledged. This was especially true of Jefferson, who disliked personal controversy and tended to take account of what the recipient of his letters might prefer to hear. As late as August 1775, for example, he told his kinsman John Randolph, who was abandoning the colonies for England, that he was “looking with fondness towards a reconciliation with Great Britain.” But it is clear that both Jefferson and Adams had privately determined on America’s independence long before Thomas Paine published Common Sense in January 1776.8
Adams tended to be more frank and honest in displaying his feelings. No one in the Congress had any doubts where he stood, and no one did more to move the delegates toward independence. Adams, Jefferson later told Daniel Webster, “was our Colossus on the floor” of the Congress. He was “not graceful, not elegant, not always fluent.” But, said Jefferson, Adams in debate could come out “with a power, both of thought and of expression which moved us from our seats.”9
By early 1776, Adams began expressing his anger at the British and his desire for independence so openly that many thought he was the author of Common Sense, the boldest and most blatant call for an outright break from Britain that the colonists had ever read. By conventional eighteenth-century standards of rhetoric, Common Sense was so full of rage and indignation, so full of coarse and everyday imagery, that few would have thought the gracious and amiable Mr. Jefferson was the author. Although Adams confessed to Abigail that he “could not have written any Thing in so manly and striking a style,” he believed he had a better understanding of how to construct governments than the author.10
Following the publication of Paine’s pamphlet, the issue in the Congress was not as much when to declare independence as how to form new governments in each of the colonies. “To contrive some Method for the Colonies to glide insensibly, from under the old Government, into a peaceable and contented Submission to new ones,” Adams in April 1776 told his learned friend Mercy Otis Warren, the sister of James Otis, was “the most difficult and dangerous part of the Business.”
Adams and the other radicals in the Congress increased the pressure to move the Congress toward a general “Recommendation to the People of all the States to institute Governments”—a recommendation that would in effect move some of the reluctant colonies into independence. For, as Adams told Abigail, “no Colony, which shall assume a Government under the People, will give it up.”11
With Congress’s resolution of May 10, 1776, Adams saw his dreams fulfilled. This important resolution, which Adams drafted, urged the colonies to adopt new governments “where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs have been established.” Under Adams’s leadership, Congress on May 15 added an extraordinary preamble to the resolution, which declared “that the exercise of every kind of authority under the . . . Crown should be totally suppressed” and called for the exertion of “all the powers of government . . . under the authority of the people of the colonies.”12
When an unenthusiastic James Duane of New York told Adams that this preamble added to the May 10 resolution was really “a Machine for the fabrication of Independence,” Adams, “smiling,” retorted that “it was independence itself.” He was not wrong. Not all the delegates who voted for the May resolution believed they were endorsing independence, noted Carter Braxton of Virginia, but “those out of doors on both sides [of] the question construe it in that manner.”13
The May declaration, Adams told his friend James Warren, “was the most important Resolution that ever was taken in America.” As he said to Abigail, it was “the last Step, a compleat Seperation” from Great Britain, “a total absolute Independence, not only of her Parliament but of her Crown.” Since Adams was the delegate most responsible for “touching some Springs and turning some small Wheels which have had and will have such Effects” that few could have foreseen, it is not surprising that he should have felt “an Awe upon my Mind, which is not easily described.”14
• • •
FOLLOWING THE MAY 1776 resolution and its preamble, which required a separate resolution, most delegates began thinking about creating new constitutions for their colonies. “It is a work of the most interesting nature,” remarked Jefferson, “and such as every individual would wish to have his voice in.” And it seemed to many as if that were indeed the case. Even the business of the Continental Congress was slowed by the lure of the constitution-making that was taking place in nearly every colony in the aftermath of the May resolutions. Many members of Congress, including the entire Maryland delegation, left for home in order to participate in the erection of new governments—and this before any declaration of independence. Except for waging the war, complained Robert Morris, the wealthy merchant from Pennsylvania, “this seems to be the present business of America.” The Congress, grumbled Francis Lightfoot Lee of Virginia, was being left “too thin.” For “Alass! Constitutions employ every pen.” Nothing in 1776—not the creation of a confederation of the states, not an alliance with France, not even the war—engaged Americans more than did the framing of their new constitutions.15
Jefferson was one of the delegates who wanted to leave the Congress in order to participate in his colony’s constitution-making. One day following Congress’s May 15 preamble to the resolution of May 10, 1776, which had called on each colony to frame a government, Jefferson wrote to his colleagues in Virginia suggesting that the entire delegation be recalled to help in drawing up the new constitution. “In truth,” he said, “it was the whole object of the present controversy.” Sometime before the middle of June 1776, he drafted a constitution and had sent it to Virginia; but it arrived too late to substantially affect the state constitution that already had been written by George Mason and other colleagues. In frustration Jefferson sat in Philadelphia and pleaded with his colleagues in Virginia to call him back home.
The structure of the government that Jefferson proposed in his draft was basically similar to the constitution adopted by his fellow Virginians. He recommended a bicameral legislature together with an executive and judiciary whose “offices were to be kept for ever separate.” Other suggestions, however, were controversial and, as George Wythe told Jefferson in July 1776, required much discussion and would have to be dealt with later—which Jefferson had every intention of doing. These included granting the right of citizenship and thus the suffrage to anyone who intended to live permanently in the state; recognizing full religious liberty for all persons and freeing the state from having to maintain any religious establishment; ending the importation of slaves; granting fifty acres of land freely to all adult white males who did not already have that many; and establishing a more equitable system of representation based on population.16
What the Virginia convention did take almost verbatim from Jefferson’s draft was his preface that contained a series of charges against the king—most of which he would repeat in his Declaration of Independence. He ended his indictment by declaring that George III was “deposed from the kingly office in this government, and absolutely divested of all it’s rights, powers, and prerogatives.” If that weren’t enough protection against tyranny, Jefferson’s executive was to be elected by a House of Representatives for a one-year term and ineligible for reelection for three years.
Although Jefferson went on to say that the executive “shall possess the powers formerly held by the king,” he made sure that very few of those powers actually remained in the executive’s hands. Unlike Virginia’s adopted constitution or the constitutions of the other states, Jefferson’s draft spelled out in remarkable detail just what that executive could not do. He would have no negative or veto over legislation; he could not control the meetings of the legislature; he could not declare war or conclude peace; he could not raise armed forces; he could not coin money or regulate weights and measures; he could not erect courts, offices, corporations, markets, and ports; he could not lay embargoes; he could not even pardon crimes or emit punishments. All these traditional prerogative powers were to be given to the legislature or abolished. So much authority was stripped from the executive that Jefferson rightly labeled the office the “Administrator” rather than the term “governor” used by the other constitutions.17
Jefferson went into such detail in repudiating all semblances of the kingly office because, as he told his colleague Edmund Pendleton in August 1776, he was anxious about the possible “re-acknolegement of the British tyrant as our king. . . . Remember,” he warned, “how universally the people run into the idea of recalling Charles the 2d. after living many years under a republican government.” Such a caution suggests just how contingent everything seemed to those revolutionaries in 1776, who, of course, could not know their future.18
When it came to the upper house or the senate in his constitution, Jefferson expressed an early uncharacteristic mistrust of the people. All the senates of the state constitutions drawn up in 1776 were presumably to be made up of the wisest and most prominent men of the community. Unlike the lower houses, or houses of representatives, the senators were to have no constituents; they were not to represent anyone. But if elected by the people, as was the case in the Virginia constitution, the senators, Jefferson thought, might get to think they had constituents and were dependent on them; they would be just another house of representatives, thus undermining the idea of mixed government. To prevent this possibility, Jefferson’s senate was to be elected by the lower house, not by the people directly. This was necessary, he claimed, in order “to get the wisest men chosen and to make them perfectly independent when chosen.” Experience had taught him, he told Pendleton, “that a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for it’s wisdom. This first secretion from them is usually crude and heterogeneous.” He had thus proposed that the senators be elected by the lower houses for a nine-year unrenewable term, so that they would not forever “be casting their eyes forward to the period of election (however distant) and be currying favor with the electors, and consequently dependent upon them.” He could accept George Mason’s plan for a system of electors to select the upper house. He could even submit to Pendleton’s suggestion “to an appointment for life, or to any thing rather than a mere creation by and dependence on the people.” But he took back much of this mistrust of the people when it came to suggestions that the senate should be confined to men who possessed a large amount of property. His experience told him that “integrity” was not “the characteristic of wealth.” In the end, he believed that “the decisions of the people, as a body, will be more honest and disinterested than those of wealthy men.”19
Making property the qualification for membership in the upper houses was a point on which Adams later would come to disagree dramatically with Jefferson. But in 1776 Adams was not that far away from Jefferson’s ideas about the formation of the senates or from the Virginia constitution that the new state finally adopted. In fact, Adams had a greater influence on the Virginia constitution of 1776 than did Jefferson and probably anyone else.20
• • •
NO REVOLUTIONARY LEADER was more interested in constitutionalism than Adams. His understanding of constitutionalism was formed from his reading of history, and especially English history. Throughout the eighteenth century, Englishmen had described their centuries-long history as essentially a struggle between the king and the people, between the prerogative powers of an encroaching Crown and the rights of the people defended by their representatives in the House of Commons. This ancient conflict between monarchy and democracy had been mediated by the aristocracy in the House of Lords acting as the holder of the scales in the marvelously balanced English constitution. In his Spirit of the Laws (1748)—the political work most widely read by the revolutionaries—the French philosophe Montesquieu had accepted this conventional understanding of the English constitution and had emphasized the role of the nobility in the House of Lords in maintaining the balance between the major historic antagonists, the king and the people.21 In 1776, at the moment of constitution-making in the states, this traditional view of the balance in the English constitution was one that Adams shared.
Adams had been committed to some sort of mixed or balanced government well before the Declaration of Independence. “There are only Three simple Forms of Government,” he declared in an oration delivered at Braintree in 1772, each of these simple forms undergirded by a social estate or social order. When the entire ruling power was entrusted to the discretion of a single person, the government, said Adams, was called a monarchy, or the rule of one. When it was placed in the hands of “a few great, rich, wise Men,” the government was an aristocracy, or the rule of the few. And when the whole power of the society was lodged with all the people, the government was termed a democracy, or the rule of the many. Each of these simple forms of government possessed a certain quality of excellence. For monarchy, it was energy; for aristocracy, it was wisdom; and for democracy, it was virtue. But Adams knew that each one of these simple forms of government, left alone, tended to run wild and become perverted. Only by balancing and mixing all three in the government, only through the reciprocal sharing of political power by the social orders of the one, the few, and the many, could the desirable qualities of each be preserved and the government be free. As Adams put it in 1772, “Liberty depends upon an exact Balance, a nice Counterpoise of the Powers in the state. . . . The best Governments in the World have been mixed.”22
And for Adams in 1772 the best government of all was the English constitution, properly mixed and balanced. Montesquieu and other eighteenth-century philosophes admired the English constitution precisely because it seemed to have achieved the balance and mixture that theorists since Aristotle and the ancient Greeks had only longed for. But it was not simply the expression of the three simple forms of government in the Crown, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons that made the English constitution seem extraordinary. More important was the fact that the whole society was embodied in these three governmental institutions. Each of the estates of the realm or, as Adams called them, “the powers of the society”—the king, peers, and people—was represented in the English government, that is, the king-in-Parliament. Not only were the three estates of the society embodied in the English government in this marvelous manner, but this tripartite English constitution corresponded beautifully with the three simple governments of antiquity—democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. All this gave the English constitution its awesome reputation and the king-in-Parliament its sovereignty.
With talk of constitution-making already in the air following publication of Paine’s Common Sense, the colony of North Carolina in early March 1776 asked its two congressional delegates, William Hooper and John Penn, to come home and bring some ideas about a form of government with them. Knowing that Adams was keenly interested in the science of politics, Hooper and Penn asked their Massachusetts colleague for advice. Sometime in late March, Adams wrote out a plan of government by hand and sent a copy to each of the Carolina delegates. George Wythe of Virginia and Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant of New Jersey learned of Adams’s plan and asked for copies too. Finally, when Richard Henry Lee requested a copy, Adams decided to publish his plan as a pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies, printed anonymously in Philadelphia in April 1776. It was the most important and influential essay that Adams ever wrote.
Even though the pamphlet had originated, as the subtitle put it, as a hastily composed Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend, and was later considered by Adams to be “a poor Scrap,” he actually had been thinking about creating new forms of government for the colonies ever since the possibility of independence had entered his head.23 In working out his plan of government he realized that he needed to take the various colonial constitutions, which, with their assemblies, councils, and governors, were miniature versions of the mixed and balanced English constitution that he admired so much, and transform them into constitutions applicable to what he assumed the American colonies would soon become—independent republics.
Adams was sure the new American governments had to be republics. But for Adams this was not as much of an innovation as it was for others. In his Novanglus essays of 1775, borrowing from the seventeenth-century English theorist James Harrington, he had defined a republic as “a government of laws, and not of men.” This definition, if just, he said, meant that “the British constitution is nothing more nor less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate.” This was one kind of republic the English had, but there could be other kinds. Because “the powers of society”—meaning the one, the few, and the many—could be combined in different ways, there was, he concluded, “an inexhaustible variety” of republics, including that of the British monarchy. Although he tried to explain that the British king “being hereditary, and being possessed of such ample and splendid prerogatives, is no objection to the government’s being a republic as long as it is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making,” he was never able to convince his fellow Americans that the British monarchy was really a republic; and the resultant confusion plagued him the rest of his life.24
• • •
HOWEVER MUCH HE DIFFERED with his fellow Americans over the definition of a republic, he at least agreed with them, and with Montesquieu, that as republics the new states would have to be founded on the principle of virtue. By classical standards virtue meant the willingness of people to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the public, the res publica. For this reason Adams very much wanted his home state of Massachusetts to call its “Government a Commonwealth.”25
Adams’s republicanism was liberal and enlightened, not narrowly classical. Certainly neither Adams nor Jefferson was so enamored of antiquity that either believed that an individual belonged solely to the political community and that human flourishing could be achieved only within that political community. Their republicanism was not incompatible with the need to protect individual rights from an overweening government. Yet both Adams and Jefferson were classically educated enough to know that republics required sufficient virtue in the character of their citizens to prevent corruption and eventual decay. For this reason, they both knew that republics were very fragile polities, and always had been throughout history. A republic, said Adams, “is productive of every Thing, which is great and excellent among Men. But its Principles are as easily destroyed as human Nature is corrupted.” Jefferson agreed. Americans, he said, had to anticipate “a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origins, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people.”26
Although Jefferson tended to see the corruption coming from the government while Adams believed it more likely inherent in human nature, both patriots knew that republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects. In monarchies, where authority flowed from the top down, each man’s desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by patronage or honor, by fear or force. In republics, however, where authority came from below, from the people themselves, each citizen must somehow be persuaded to sacrifice his personal desires for the sake of the public good. In their purest form republics had no adhesives, no bonds holding their societies together, except their citizens’ voluntary patriotism and willingness to obey public authority. Without virtue and self-sacrifice, republics would fall apart.
Did Americans have this “positive Passion for the public Good,” this kind of virtue? That was the question that Adams anxiously asked himself as he outlined his plan of government. As he told Mercy Otis Warren in April 1776, he had seen “such Selfishness and Littleness even in New England, that I sometimes tremble to think that altho We are engaged in the best Cause that ever employed the Human Heart, yet the Prospect of success is doubtfull not for Want of Power or of Wisdom, but of Virtue.” He knew that the new American governments would have to be popular, but he realized that “the degrees of Popularity in a Government are so various” that much might be done to prevent their corruption.27
To counter the possibility that the American people might not have sufficient virtue to sustain their new republics, Adams suggested a number of protective measures. In his pamphlet he urged a rotation of all offices, the creation of an independent judiciary that would be distinctly separated from the legislative and executive powers, laws for the liberal education of youth, and the passage of sumptuary laws. Advocating these sumptuary laws regulating personal expenditures on food and dress, he admitted, “will excite a smile.” But, he contended, they would be good for the happiness of the people and the war effort. “Frugality is a great revenue, besides curing us of vanities, levities, and fopperies which are real antidotes to all the great, manly and warlike virtues.”28
• • •
BUT MOST IMPORTANT IN COUNTERING the self-interestedness of human nature was his recommendation that the new constitutions possess some of the mixed and balanced features of the English constitution, which he claimed was “a fine, a nice, a delicate machine, and the perfection of it depends upon such complicated movements, that it is as easily disordered as the human body.”29 For Americans, however, he knew that this delicate machine would have to be republicanized. To prevent the people from having complete control of the government and running amok, all three “powers of society” had to be embodied in the constitution. This meant that the people would be represented in only one part of the legislature, in what most Americans called their houses of representatives. It was this “Popular Power, the democraticall Branch of our Constitution,” he said, that had been invaded by the British government. This popular assembly, said Adams, “should be a miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.”30
But once the people were represented in this one assembly, the “question arises whether all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, shall be left in this body?” Adams answered this question with as much passion as he felt about anything. “I think a people can not be long free, nor ever happy, whose government is in one Assembly.” For this reason he never ceased expressing horror at what Pennsylvania did in 1776 in creating a constitution with a unicameral legislature and a plural executive. In fact, in subsequent years his well-known celebration of a two-house legislature became a major weapon wielded by those seeking to revamp the radical Pennsylvania constitution.31 Adams confessed that “it would grieve me to the very Soul” if his own state of Massachusetts ever contemplated establishing “a single Assembly as a Legislature.” For the rest of his life, this devotion to a bicameral legislature embodying two principal “powers of society” became the basis of all his political theory.32
To avoid all the evils that flowed from placing all the people’s power in a single assembly, Adams urged that another distinct legislative body be created, which he labeled “a Council.” This council or upper house would not be another representation of the people. Instead, it would be an embodiment of the social power of the few, the aristocracy, in accord with the traditional theory of mixed government. In this respect his upper house was no different from Jefferson’s proposed senate.
With his proposal for a council, Adams was obviously thinking of his own Massachusetts colonial constitution, in which the Council (the upper house) had often tried to arbitrate the struggles between the royal governors and the people. “If the legislative power is wholly in one Assembly, and the executive in another, or in a single person,” wrote Adams, “these two powers will oppose and enervate upon each other, until the contest shall end in war.” To avoid this danger, another house in the legislature was necessary. The councils—or senates, as most states labeled the upper houses—would act, as the House of Lords in the English constitution did, “as a mediator between the two extreme branches of the legislature, that which represent the people and that which is vested with the executive.”33 This was how Montesquieu had described the role of the House of Lords in the English constitution. In other words, Adams conceived of his republicanized aristocracy mediating the classic struggle between monarchy and democracy that he and other Whigs assumed had gone on throughout the entire trajectory of English history.
If these aristocratic councils were to play their balancing role between the governors and people in the new mixed state constitutions, however, they would have to be a good deal stronger and more independent than the colonial councils had been. Even though the Massachusetts Council had been elected by both houses of the legislature, rather than appointed by the Crown, as was the case with the upper houses of the other colonies, it seldom had been able to resist the influence of the governor. “In disputes between the governor and the house,” Adams wrote in 1775, “the council have generally adhered to the former, and in many cases have complied with his humour” rather than exercise its independent judgment.34
Adams proposed that both houses of the legislature, together, would annually elect the governor, who, like the king in England, would be “an integral part of the legislature,” thus becoming an equal participant in lawmaking with the house of representatives and the senate. Although this governor would be “stripped of most of those badges of domination called prerogatives,” he, like the English king, said Adams, ought to retain a veto power over all legislation. This was a far more powerful governor than Jefferson’s proposed executive.
Although Adams’s plan of a bicameral legislature and a separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers very much influenced the state constitution-makers in 1776, his suggestion of a gubernatorial veto was too much for most of them. Except for the early constitution of South Carolina, and that only temporarily, all the revolutionary state constitutions prohibited their governors from having any role in legislation.
Even Adams’s proposal that governors be granted a veto power over legislation was made timidly and without much assurance that it would be followed. As he told his colleagues in Massachusetts, he did not “expect, nor indeed desire that it should be attempted to give the Governor a Negative, in our Colony.” Let the chief executive, he said, be only the head of the Council Board, a small executive advisory cabinet that, unlike the colonial Council, would have no legislative authority. “Our People will never Submit to more,” and, as he conceded, it was “not clear that it is best they should.”35
It was not just the elimination of the role of the governors in legislation that made the state constitutions of 1776 truly radical. Taking away all of the governors’ traditional prerogative powers, as both Jefferson and Adams suggested, the framers of the state constitutions severely undermined, if they didn’t entirely destroy, the chief magistrate’s major responsibility for ruling the society—an abrupt departure from the English constitutional tradition. The eighteenth-century English monarch may have been severely confined by the Bill of Rights of 1689 and other parliamentary restrictions, but few Englishmen ever doubted that the principal responsibility for governing the realm still belonged to the Crown. With the 1776 state constitutions, this was no longer true. When the governors had even the pardoning power wrested from their hands and granted to the popular legislatures, then it became obvious that such an enfeebled executive could no longer be a magisterial ruler in any traditional sense, but could only be an “Administrator,” as Jefferson had aptly named the office.
• • •
ADAMS WAS SURPRISED BY the rapid acceptance of the ideas expressed in his pamphlet. The adoption of republican governments, especially in the South, was “astonishing.” Prior to 1774, who could have predicted it? “Idolatry to Monarchs and servility to Aristocratical Pride,” he declared, “was never so totally eradicated, from so many Minds in so short a Time.”36
Nevertheless, it was not long before Jefferson and Adams and many other constitution-makers of 1776 came to regret what they had done. When he became governor of Virginia in 1779, Jefferson came to appreciate only too clearly the weakness of the office his colleagues had created. As he looked back from 1816, he realized that he and his fellow Americans in 1776 had not truly understood republicanism. “In truth,” he said, “the abuses of monarchy had so much filled all the space of political contemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy.” Out of our dislike of kings and former royal governors we had emasculated our new elected republican governors. “We had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that ‘governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people and execute it.’”37
Adams in 1816 would have agreed that the constitutional framers in 1776 had not fully understood what he had repeatedly called “the divine science of politicks.” But it was not because they had failed to embody the will of the people in all parts of their governments. Rather, it was because they had granted too much power to the people in the houses of representatives. They should have offset that popular power with stronger and more distinctive senates and more powerful governors, who should never have had their prerogatives taken away from them in the first place. Above all, Adams believed, these senates and governors should never have been considered to embody the will of the people. They were the aristocracy and monarchy of a proper mixed constitution; the people, the democracy, existed only in the houses of representatives.38
• • •
MUCH OF THIS TALK OF NEW GOVERNMENTS and the planning for new constitutions had taken place as a result of the Congress’s May 1776 resolutions and thus before the colonies actually declared their independence from Great Britain. So Adams had a point when he later argued that his May resolutions were more important than the Declaration of Independence, which in his mind became only a belated legal recognition of what already was taking place. Few Americans agreed with him, and certainly not Jefferson. But in May 1776 Jefferson was fortunate that Virginia ignored his wishes and refused to recall him. If he had gone home, he would have missed the most important moment of his life.
On June 11, 1776, the Congress appointed a committee of five delegates to draft a formal declaration of independence. The Congress aimed for geographical diversity: Jefferson from Virginia, Adams from Massachusetts, Roger Sherman from Connecticut, Robert R. Livingston from New York, and Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. Adams in his autobiography claimed that this “Committee of Five” had appointed Jefferson and him as a subcommittee to draft the declaration. But Adams said that he had urged Jefferson to do the drafting by himself. He told Jefferson that it was important to have a Virginian take the lead. Adams said that he had been so obnoxiously zealous in promoting independence that a document he drafted would be more severely scrutinized and criticized by the Congress than one composed by Jefferson. Besides, he knew very well the “Elegance” of Jefferson’s pen.39
Adams repeated this account in a letter to Timothy Pickering in 1822, some of which Pickering quoted in a Fourth of July oration in 1823 that was subsequently published. When this oration came to Jefferson’s attention, he wrote his friend James Madison that Adams’s memory was faulty—not surprising, he said, since Adams was nearly eighty-seven years of age and the events had taken place nearly a half century earlier.40 Jefferson, who was himself eighty, claimed that he had some notes taken at the time that showed that the committee had appointed him alone to draft the Declaration. Although the notes have disappeared, if they ever existed, Jefferson was correct that he alone was appointed to draw up the document, something that Adams had previously noted in a diary entry of June 23, 1779.41
Of course, no one in 1776 realized how significant the drafting of the Declaration would become. Besides the May resolutions, which had called on the colonists to suppress Crown authority and set up independent governments, Adams thought the really important decision for independence had been taken on July 2, when the Congress voted to break away from the British empire. “The Second Day of July,” he told Abigail, “will be the most memorable Epocha in the History of America.” He believed that it “would be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great Anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by Solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be 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 forever more.”42
Adams was so busy at this time that he was probably relieved that Jefferson was assigned the task of drafting the Declaration. At the same time as he was asked to serve on the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence, he was appointed to two powerful committees: one designed to form a Board of War that would oversee military operations, and a second assigned to prepare a plan of treaties that the country would make with foreign powers—assignments that surely Adams believed were more crucial than drawing up a declaration of independence.43 By the early nineteenth century, however, both he and Jefferson knew better. The so-called authorship of the Declaration had taken on immense emotional significance for both men; indeed, it had become one of the most important issues dividing them.
Jefferson made no claim of originality in drafting the document. The object of the Declaration, he recalled later, in answer to the many requests for his sources, was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.” Jefferson said he had “turned to neither book nor pamphlet” nor to “any particular and previous writing.” Instead, he said in 1825, the authority of the Declaration rested “on the harmonizing sentiments of the day.” It was simply meant “to be an expression of the American mind.”44
• • •
EVEN THE FAMOUS PHRASE from the Declaration that “all men are created equal” was not new, at least not to those who considered themselves modern and enlightened. This radical idea, of course, had roots in Christianity and Western culture that went back centuries, but by the eighteenth century it had taken on for many a literal and secular significance that is still the foundation of America’s democratic faith. The slaveholding planter William Byrd, who was as much of an aristocrat as Virginia was ever to know, had read widely and was a learned member of the Royal Society, a London organization devoted to the advancement of knowledge. Nevertheless, despite his great distance from the common man, he wanted to be thought modern and enlightened and thus could not help affirming in 1728 that “the principal difference between one people and another proceeds only from the differing opportunities of improvement.” Governor Francis Fauquier of Virginia, Jefferson’s dining and music partner, made the point more bluntly: “White, Red, or Black, polished or unpolished,” he declared in 1760, “Men are Men.” James Boswell, Dr. Johnson’s great biographer, during his tour to the Hebrides in 1773, was surprised to find a black African servant in the north of Scotland whose manners were no different from those of a white servant from Bohemia. But then he realized that he had forgotten the modern presumption that culture was socially constructed. “A man is like a bottle,” he observed, “which you may fill with red wine or with white.”45
Republicans especially had to believe that human nature could be shaped and molded and made more virtuous. If one held that human nature was “totally depraved, wicked, and corrupt,” then, said Nathaniel Chipman, a Yale graduate and eventually the chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, faith in the people’s capacity for self-government was doomed. To be sure, Chipman admitted, there were numerous examples in history of tyranny and the abuses of power, even by the people. But these, he said, were not generally produced by “any malignity, any culpable disposition in the nature of man.” They were instead “the effect of situation,” of circumstances, of the environment. In other words, enlightened liberals had come to believe that what caused individuals to behave in an evil or corrupt manner and distinguished each of them from one another was the environment in which they were raised, the circumstances that molded and shaped them.46
John Adams agreed. He had to agree, at least at the beginning of his career, not simply because, like Byrd and Jefferson, he had read books and wanted to be thought enlightened, but, more important, because his personal experience told him that all men being created equal was true. As a young unconnected lawyer making his way in Massachusetts society, he had so often felt the arrogance and pretensions of the so-called great families that he could not help identifying emotionally with common ordinary people—“the multitude, the million, the populace, the vulgar, the mob, the herd and the rabble, as the great always delight to call them.” These “meanest and lowest of the people,” he wrote anonymously in newspaper publications in the 1760s, were far from being mere animals as some gentry called them; they were in fact “by the unalterable laws of God and nature, as well intitled to the benefit of the air to breathe, light to see, food to eat, and clothes to wear, as the nobles or the king.” Adams believed devoutly—he had to believe—as he wrote in 1766, a decade before Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that “all men are born equal.” No patriot in the decade leading up to the Revolution defended with more passion common ordinary people against those who would have them “ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and cloathed like swine and hounds.”47
Adams came to appreciate, as much as any American did, the capacity of individuals to transform themselves. Educated people came to believe—it was the basic premise of all enlightened thinking in the eighteenth century—that individuals were not born to be what they might become. As John Locke had written, the mind originally was “a white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas,” and it was filled up through time by “Experience.”48 As Adams pointed out in 1760, Locke, with the help of Francis Bacon, had “discovered a new World.” He had demonstrated that human personalities at birth were unformed, impressionable things that could be cultivated and civilized. Experience gained through the senses was what molded and created people’s characters; it inscribed itself on the blank slate, the tabula rasa, of people’s minds. Hence, said Adams, by controlling and manipulating the sensations that people experienced, their character could be transformed. Adams took the image of cultivation seriously and literally. The “Rank and unwholesome Weeds” that had so dominated traditional society could now be “Exterminated and the fruits raised.” Barbarism could be eliminated and civility increased. This kind of enlightenment had been denied to Cicero and the ancients. The idea that only cultivation separated one person from another was, he said, “the true sphere of Modern Genius.”49
In other words, nurture, not nature, was what mattered. This was the explosive eighteenth-century assumption that lay behind the idea that all men were created equal. Not everyone had the same capacity to reason, but since everyone had senses, this Lockean notion that all ideas were produced by the senses was inherently egalitarian.
• • •
MANY OF JEFFERSON’S COLLEAGUES in Virginia were not entirely happy with all this talk of being born equal. In the convention drawing up the new Virginia constitution in 1776, George Mason prefaced the document with a Declaration of Rights stating that “all men are by nature equally free and independent.” Robert Carter Nicholas raised the question of the applicability of Mason’s statement to black slaves. Could such a pronouncement be construed to free the slaves? Edmund Pendleton solved the problem by proposing to insert the clause “when they enter into a state of society,” thus placing the African slaves outside of society and unentitled to enjoy the rights of citizenship.50
In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson offered a more radical solution to the problem by doubting his own belief in the natural equality of all human beings. In a sense he had to. If one believed in the natural equality of blacks, then slavery became impossible, which is why most enlightened thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic came to oppose slavery. Like other slaveholding southerners, Jefferson sensed this and came to realize that black slavery could ultimately be justified and explained only if black Africans were considered a different order of being, a different race, one unequal to whites.
Although many white Americans explained the blackness of the Africans in environmental terms—the hot African sun had scorched their skin—and believed that in time living in a more moderate climate their skin would whiten, Jefferson suggested that there might be inherent differences between blacks and whites that climate and cultivation could not change. “It would be right,” he conceded, “to make great allowances of the difference of condition, of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they move.” Nevertheless, he said, they had not taken advantage to learn from the conversation and manners of their masters. In other words, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson suggested that black Africans might be so different from whites—that they did not begin life with blank slates similar to other human beings—that education and cultivation could never make them equal.51
He didn’t feel that way about the Indians. In fact, he was quick to assert that the native Indians were “in body and mind the equal of the white man” and that any difference between them and whites was “not a difference of nature, but of circumstance.” Indian women, for example, were “submitted to unjust drudgery,” but that was true of “every barbarous people.” If white Americans were “in equal barbarism, our females would be equal drudges.” Once properly civilized, the Indian women would become domesticated and the equal of American white women. Although the Indians generally had few of the advantages the black slaves had in living in close proximity to the whites, they seemed to Jefferson to possess naturally the capacity for imagination and creativity. The oratory of the Indians was rich and sublime. They were able to carve out figures and crayoned pictures that were “not destitute of design and merit . . . , so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation.” In other words, they possessed at birth the same blank slates that whites possessed.52
Alas, however, he could not say the same for black Africans. Although he advanced his opinion “as suspicion only” and with “great diffidence,” he claimed that black Africans were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.” It was possible, he admitted, that their distinctiveness as a race was due to “time and circumstances,” as many of his fellow white Americans believed, but in the end Jefferson seemed to favor the view that the Africans’ presumed inferiority was the result of their nature at birth, not their condition as slaves. In bravery and in memory, Jefferson acknowledged, blacks were the equal of whites, and “in music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time.” But in reason they were “much inferior” to whites. And they lacked the capacity for poetry. Whereas the Indians’ imagination was “glowing and elevated,” the Africans’ was “dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” Although surrounded by black slaves, Jefferson said he had never yet found a black who “had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration,” or who had displayed “even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” So it wasn’t their circumstances as slaves that explained their inferiority, he concluded. After all, the condition of the Roman slaves had not prevented them from becoming cultivated in ways that the African American slaves seemed unable to duplicate. Because Jefferson was unwilling to admit the great differences of circumstances between the slavery of antiquity, where the slaves were often literate and part of the households, and that of the plantations in eighteenth-century America, his entire analysis was fundamentally flawed.53
Although many Americans, especially southern Americans, may have agreed with Jefferson, many others did not. Most Americans who thought about the issue remained committed to the natural equality of all human beings, accounting for the obvious differences of people by their differing environments and differing degrees of cultivation. Adams became one of the conspicuous exceptions. By 1809 he was telling Benjamin Rush that he believed that “there is as much in the breed of men as there is in that of horses”—the kind of ancien régime comment that made people think Adams favored a hereditary aristocracy, which he emphatically denied. But within a decade of the writing of the Declaration of Independence, it was clear that Adams no longer believed that all men were born equal.54
The belief in the natural equality of all people had powerful implications. If all human beings were indeed equal at birth, if what separated one person from another was simply cultivation and education, then it followed that those who considered themselves enlightened suddenly felt morally responsible for the weak and downtrodden in their society. In the minds of the gentry, concern and compassion replaced smugness and indifference. If the culture—what people thought and believed—was man-made and could be changed, then the status of the lowly and deprived could be reformed and improved. Criminals were not born to behave in an evil manner and could be rehabilitated. Even “Savages,” said Adams, could be civilized.55 These Lockean assumptions lay behind all the reform movements of the revolutionary era, from antislavery to the changing ideas of criminal punishment, from the formation of dozens of benevolent societies to the obsession with education—not just the Americans’ interest in formal schooling, but their concern with a variety of ways of remaking their culture and society. These comprised everything from the histories they wrote, and the advice manuals they read, to the many icons they created—including the Great Seal, Jefferson’s Virginia capitol, John Trumbull’s paintings, and the design of Washington, D.C.
• • •
IN 1776 BOTH ADAMS AND JEFFERSON, along with Benjamin Franklin, were interested in designing a device for the seal of the United States. It seemed as important as drawing up the articles of war. Adams proposed his favorite classical symbol—Hercules surveying the choice between Virtue and Sloth, which was probably the most popular emblem of the eighteenth century. Jefferson suggested of all things a scene from the Bible, “the Children of Israel in the Wilderness.” Franklin proposed another biblical scene, that of Moses “lifting up his Wand, and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh, in his Chariot overwhelmed with the Waters.” But, as Adams admitted, these designs were “too complicated,” and the job was turned over to the secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, who finally worked out the present Great Seal, which can be seen on the reverse side of the one-dollar bill.56
Both Jefferson and Adams were eager to leave the Congress and get back home. Jefferson was especially eager to return to Virginia. He told his colleagues in Virginia that he needed to return because of the health of his wife, Patty; but equally important was his intensifying desire to get back in order to begin to realize the many liberal reforms he had in mind. As he recalled in his autobiography, “I knew that our legislature under the regal government had many very vicious points which urgently required reformation, and I thought I could be of more use in forwarding that work.”57 Not in the Congress and not in Philadelphia, but only in what he called “my own country” of Virginia could he take advantage of the Revolution and fulfill his enlightened dreams.58 Even something as small as the design of the state’s seal commanded his attention, and he expressed some unhappiness with what his colleagues had done. What “for god’s sakes,” he asked, did the legislature mean by adopting Deus nobis haec otia fecit (God bestowed upon us this leisure) as the motto for the state’s seal? The motto, he claimed, was puzzling to many members of Congress (but perhaps not to his Virginia colleagues who took for granted the slaves who gave them their leisure); besides, he said, the slogan was inappropriate for a country at war.59 Finally, in early September Jefferson was able to get away and return to Virginia.
In the Virginia legislature that convened in October 1776, Jefferson immediately set about reforming his society in accord with enlightened reason. He introduced bills abolishing the legal devices of primogeniture (in which the estate passed to the eldest son) and entail (which kept the estate in the stem line of the family). “A distinct set of families,” he wrote in his autobiography, had used these legal devices to pass on their wealth “from generation to generation” and had formed themselves into “a Patrician order, distinguished by the splendor and luxury of their establishments.” By abolishing these legal devices, he hoped to destroy the privileges of this “aristocracy of wealth” in order “to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent” that was “essential to a well-ordered republic.” He wanted Virginia’s lands freely distributed as widely and as equitably as possible to its citizens.60
Although he had expressed some doubts about the people’s ability to select the members of the upper house, he had no intention of limiting their participation in the government in general. He wanted to extend “the right of suffrage (or in other words the rights of a citizen) to all who had a permanent intention of living in the country.” This could be measured by “either the having resided a certain time, or having a family, or having property, any or all of them.” This meant granting every adult male the right to vote. Although women were thought dependent and thus without voting rights, still Jefferson’s proposal for the suffrage was as broad as any made in 1776.61
At the same time he set forth elaborate plans for revising the state’s laws. He aimed to overhaul the system of criminal punishment, introduce complete religious freedom, and create a system of public education. Having read On Crimes and Punishments (1764) by the Italian philosophe Cesare Beccaria, Jefferson was eager to liberalize the harsh penal codes of the colonial period, which had relied on the bodily punishment of whipping, mutilation, and especially execution. Like Beccaria, he wanted punishments that were proportionate to the crimes, and thus he proposed the lex talionis, the law of retaliation. So the death penalty was restricted to murder and perhaps treason, and those men guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy would be castrated. Over the next several years he gave more time to this reform of criminal punishment than to all the others put together, but much of it went beyond what most of his colleagues would accept.62
This was equally true of his other proposals for reform. He found, as he recalled in his autobiography, that in the 1770s “the public mind would not yet bear” his proposal to gradually abolish slavery, “nor,” he wrote in 1821, “would it bear it even at this day.” He knew John Locke had proposed religious toleration, but that was not enough. “Where he stopped short,” he said, “we may go on” and establish true religious freedom. After all, toleration implied a religious establishment that merely allowed other religions to exist.63 Unfortunately, his effort was delayed and was finally passed in 1786 only through the efforts of his friend James Madison. Jefferson’s farsighted plan for creating a three-tiered—elementary school, grammar school, university—publicly funded educational system likewise was turned down by his colleagues. Still, he believed that his several reforms, as he stated in his autobiography, were based on his hope that “every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.”64
His Virginia colleagues must have been stunned by Jefferson’s extraordinary enthusiasm for reform and the ambitious nature of his vision. His desire to transform the aristocracy of which he was a prime and wealthy member must have been challenging and bewildering to many of his fellow legislators. A few conservatives like Carter Braxton dismissed Jefferson as one of those “Men said to possess unbounded knowledge” who were full of “Chimerical . . . Schemes and Ideas” that tended to “injure more than they benefit mankind.”65
Others, however, like the respected senior legislator Edmund Pendleton, took the proposals of the thirty-three-year-old Jefferson seriously, but tempered some of their impracticalities with doses of realism. Nevertheless, throughout all the debates and discussions, Jefferson kept the friendship and above all the respect of nearly all of his colleagues. He knew so much and had read so widely and was so intelligent and always amiable that they scarcely knew how to resist him. Besides, they realized that he was expressing the most liberal and enlightened thinking of the Western world, and they could not help wanting to be part of that Enlightenment.
It was an extraordinary moment in Virginia’s history. These Virginia slaveholding planters knew—John Adams told them so in June 1776—that the Revolution was placing all traditional aristocracies under assault. All “the Dons, the Bashaws, the Grandees, the Patricians, the Sachems, the Nabobs, call them by what Name you please,” said Adams in a letter that month to Patrick Henry, “sigh, and groan, and fret, and Sometimes Stamp, and foam, and curse—but all in vain.” A more equal liberty was spreading throughout America, and, Adams told Henry, “that Exuberance of Pride, which has produced an insolent Dominion, in a few, a very few oppulent, monopolizing Families, will be brought down nearer to the Confines of Reason and Moderation, than they have been used.”66
Even though they might have read Adams’s letter to Henry or at least knew of its predictions, few of the dons, nabobs, and grandees of Virginia saw themselves threatened by the Revolution. Despite being heavily in debt, despite uneasiness over signs of corruption in their society, despite some apprehension over possible slave revolts, the slaveholding planters of Virginia remained remarkably sure of their position in society. Adams himself was surprised by the planters’ eagerness to engage in the Revolution. But they had not just engaged in the Revolution; the Virginia aristocrats had in their own eyes taken the lead in breaking from Great Britain. Few aristocracies in history have ever undertaken a revolution with more confidence and enthusiasm than these southern aristocratic planters. And Jefferson was the most confident and enthusiastic of all.
• • •
ADAMS WAS AS MUCH AWARE as Jefferson of the spirit of enlightenment spreading throughout the Atlantic world, and like Jefferson, he expressed some longing to leave Philadelphia and get back home. But unlike Jefferson, he actually relished his participation in continental affairs, and was very eager to keep his seat in Congress. He was far more deeply involved in the business of the Congress than Jefferson. He was the chair of the Board of War, essentially in charge of the war, and was a member of the commission that met with British admiral Lord Richard Howe in August 1776 to discuss the possibility of peace. Adams missed his family, no doubt, but he returned to Massachusetts in October mainly because he hoped to persuade the state legislature to increase his salary so he could bring Abigail and his family back to Philadelphia.
Unlike Jefferson, he had no interest in hurrying home in order to overhaul the society of his state. Of course, he realized only too keenly that the societies of New England already had many of the things that Jefferson desired for Virginia. In fact, Adams had written his Thoughts on Government with the hope that it might help to convert the aristocratic South to New England’s ways. He knew he lived in a very different society from that of Virginia. By Virginia’s standards, slavery scarcely existed in New England, and by 1776 it was already rapidly being eliminated. Massachusetts had possessed a public school system since the seventeenth century and was tackling its system of criminal punishment more effectively than the states of the South. Moreover, New England already had a broad suffrage and annual elections and possessed no social rank that resembled the great slave-owning planters of Virginia. In fact, Adams thought that the biggest problem that Massachusetts society faced in 1776 was not to be reformed by expanding the power of the people, but rather to control and restrain the already existing power of the people—popular power that was being dangerously aroused by the turmoil of the Revolution.
Hence, unlike Jefferson, who was so eager to get moving on reform, Adams advised patience. He told his Massachusetts colleagues to move “slowly and deliberately” in creating their government. He had no interest in reforming a society that needed no reform. Beware of “dangerous Innovations,” he warned, especially since “the Spirit of Levelling” was abroad. He worried about “Duplicity” and “Hypocrisy” and the many reports that all kinds of wild proposals were flying about the province. “Are not these ridiculous Projects, prompted by disaffected Persons, in order to divide, dissipate, and distract, the Attention of the People, at a Time, when every thought Should be employed, and every Sinew exerted, for the Defence of the Country.”67 Reforming society was just not in his nature. Although he hated slavery and never owned any slaves, he hoped that a bill in the Massachusetts legislature in 1777 abolishing slavery would be allowed to “sleep for a Time. We have Causes enough of Jealousy Discord and Division, and this bill will certainly add to the Number.”68
In Adams’s eyes, the great danger of the Revolution was social disorder—something Jefferson never feared, at least not in 1776. “There must be a Decency, and Respect, and Veneration introduced for Persons in Authority, of every Rank, or We are undone,” Adams told his friend James Warren in April of that year. “In a popular Government, this is the only Way of Supporting order.”69 Especially alarming were the numbers of new men taking advantage of the war to make money and to establish themselves as mushroom aristocrats. “When the pot boils the scum will rise,” James Otis had warned at the outset. Primed as Adams was to think the worst of human nature, he was quick to appreciate how rapidly the scum was rising. By 1777 Adams feared “the Rage of Speculation and Flames of Passion” that were spreading throughout Massachusetts. “Our State,” he lamented, “abounds with ambitious Men, in such Numbers, and with avaritious ones, who are still worse, and with others whom both Passions unite, in a great degree, who are the most dangerous of all,” that he despaired of Massachusetts achieving any order and stability.70
Adams became especially troubled by suggestions that the qualifications for voting might be reformed. Don’t touch the issue, he warned James Sullivan, a lawyer recently appointed to the Massachusetts superior court. “There will be no End of it,” he predicted. “New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights are not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell.”71 He had none of the confidence that Jefferson expressed in his proposals for expanding the suffrage.
Of course, Jefferson, who was married to a conventional southern belle, could scarcely have imagined extending the franchise to women. He thought women were “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics.” Instead, “they are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning from political debate.” Women had “the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other, and the art to cultivate it beyond all others.” As late as 1813, he believed that the participation of women in politics was “an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.” Adams, married to Abigail, could never be so sanguine.72
Abigail was a woman of such wit, passion, and volubility—expressing her views about everything from education to forms of government—that she was bound to think about women participating in politics. In her now famous letter to John written on March 31, 1776, Abigail suggested to her husband, who she knew was busy in Philadelphia thinking about creating new governments, not to overlook the role of women.
Remember the Ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.73
As biting as the passage is, it doesn’t have quite the significance that many recently have attributed to it. John certainly did not take it seriously. “I cannot but laugh” at her ideas, he said in response. And he went on in the same amusing and saucy tone Abigail had used, telling her that men knew better than to repeal their “Masculine systems.” Although those systems were “in full Force, you know,” he said, “they are little more than Theory.” Men were actually “the subjects. . . . We have only the Name of Masters,” and giving that title up “would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat.”74
John’s response clearly reveals the joking nature of their relationship. Abigail was not a modern feminist and she never became one. She was clever and witty and, proud of her sauciness, loved to tease and banter with her husband, which is what she was doing in this famous letter, to which John responded in a similar manner. Abigail kidded her husband about many things, including his being a big-shot delegate at the Continental Congress. At one point she suggested that their Braintree cows, suffering from drought, ought to petition the Congress, setting forth their grievances and their deprivations of ancient privileges that ought to be restored to them. She even joked with him about lawyers. Her “Remember the Ladies” letter was another example of her teasing. In her statement, Abigail was not expecting to fundamentally transform the role of women in her society.
Teasing, of course, can often make a serious point, and in her bantering remarks, Abigail was certainly expressing a self-conscious awareness of the legally dependent and inferior position of women—a provocative awareness that she never lost. In 1782 she noted once again the things women were denied. They were “excluded from honours and from offices” of government; “deprived of a voice in Legislation,” they were “obliged to submit to those Laws which are imposed upon us.” “Even in the freest countrys our property is subject to the control and disposal of our partners, to whom the Laws have given a sovereign Authority.” Despite these sorts of complaints, however, Abigail did not seriously question the place of women in her society. She in fact listed the deprivations women suffered from simply to show how virtuous and patriotic women were.75
Although she did want women to be as well educated as men (itself a bold proposal), she was generally content merely with her domestic role as wife and mother. What she most disliked was having to act as the sole head of the household in John’s absence, which she regarded as an unnatural sacrifice for the patriotic cause. Still, she always considered “it as an indispensable requisite that every American wife should herself know how to order and regulate her family; how to govern her domestics, and train up her children.”76
Although Abigail became proud of her success as a manager of the family farm and the family finances, she wanted nothing more than to have her husband back so she could resume what she thought of as her rightful role as wife and mother. To conceive of Abigail as somehow yearning to be like her husband is not only anachronistic, it also trivializes and demeans her domestic character—as if the male model of political activity is the only standard of worth.77 At the same time she certainly felt the equal of men, telling her sister in 1799 that she would “never consent to have our sex considered in an inferiour point of light.” She admitted that God and nature designed men and women to move in different orbits, but that didn’t make them unequal: “If man is Lord, woman is Lordess.” Although she accepted the fact that women did not hold the reins of government, she saw no reason that women could not judge how those governments were conducted.78
It is not surprising that John, knowing Abigail’s feelings and having read her saucy letter about women voting, should have warned Sullivan not to contemplate changing the suffrage.