ALTHOUGH BOTH JEFFERSON and Adams were abroad in 1787 and thus missed attending the Philadelphia convention that drafted the new federal Constitution, they had been deeply involved in constitution-making from the very beginning of the revolutionary era. Jefferson had left the Continental Congress in 1776 and returned to Virginia in order to participate in creating Virginia’s new republican constitution. For his part, Adams had written his Thoughts on Government, which became the most important pamphlet affecting the drafting of the state constitutions in 1776.
Although Virginia had drafted a constitution in 1776, Massachusetts had not. When royal authority in Massachusetts collapsed in 1775, the provincial congress had simply resumed the old charter of 1691, with the understanding that a more permanent constitution would be formed later. In 1778 the legislature finally got around to drafting a constitution for the state, which it submitted to the towns for approval. Because this constitution lacked a bill of rights and had problems with representation, the upper house, and the militia, the people in the towns turned it down. Some had criticized the constitution because it had not adequately protected property and the rights of creditors; others criticized it because it had been drafted by the legislature instead of by a body specially called for that purpose. How could a constitution be fundamental if it was created and alterable by the existing legislature?
Having a constitution that was different from ordinary statutes was a problem from the outset. To draft their constitutions, nearly all the states in 1776 had relied on congresses or conventions that were usually just their legislatures meeting without their royal governors. Because the constitutions were created by the legislatures, they presumably could also be changed or amended by the legislatures. Some of the constitution-makers in 1776 realized that their constitutions were supposed to be a kind of fundamental law, different from ordinary statutes, and they sought anxiously and confusedly to deal with the distinction. Delaware provided for a supermajority, five-sevenths of the legislature, for changing the constitution. Maryland said that its constitution could be amended only by a two-thirds vote of two successive legislatures. Most states, however, simply enacted their constitutions as if they were regular statutes. Everyone believed that the constitutions were special kinds of law, but no one knew quite how to make them so.
No one struggled with this problem of distinguishing fundamental from statutory law more persistently than Jefferson. His most detailed thinking on the subject appeared in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson wrote that book, the only one he ever authored, in response to the Marquis de Barbé-Mabois, the secretary to the French Legation, who in 1780 sought information about the American states for his government.
In the section Query XIII, entitled “Constitution,” Jefferson began with a lengthy description of the seventeenth-century charter granted by the Crown to the planters and adventurers of the Virginia Company. Not only did the seventeenth-century charters granted to several colonies outline a structure of government for each colony, including a governor, council, and general assembly, but they also secured all the rights of Englishmen. Even when the king abrogated the charter in 1624 and made Virginia a crown colony, the structure of government and the rights of the people remained intact. When Parliament in the brief Commonwealth period during the English Civil War reinforced these articles and rights in 1651, the people of Virginia, said Jefferson, assumed that they had secured their autonomy and their “exemption from taxation but by their own assembly.” This laid the constitutional basis for the colonists’ opposition to British policies a century or so later.1
By his extensive description of all the written documents in seventeenth-century Virginian history, Jefferson demonstrated the importance of the early colonial charters as models for the constitution-making of 1776. Adams agreed. The charters, he said, were a kind of contract between the king and his subjects in which the king stipulated that his subjects “should enjoy all the rights and liberties of Englishmen forever.”2 Although the charters had been initially grants of the Crown to commercial companies to carry out certain public ends, by the eve of the Revolution they had been turned into defensive documents or, as Adams called them, contracts between the king and the people of each colony in which protection and allegiance were the considerations. These charters both prescribed forms of government and protected the rights of the people from encroaching power.
Consequently, by 1776 Americans were primed to think of a constitution as a written document set apart from the government and that somehow both ordered and delimited it. This was a very different understanding of a constitution from the way the English understood a constitution.
Englishmen tended to think of their constitution as including the operations of the government; it was the way in which the government was constituted or put together. It was, as the Tory Charles Inglis declared in 1776, “that assemblage of laws, customs, and institutions which form the general system; according to which the several powers of the state are distributed, and their respective rights are secured to the different members of the community.”3 The English constitution was not a single written document set apart from the government and ordinary lawmaking. For Englishmen, as William Blackstone declared, there could be no distinction between the “constitution” and the “system of laws.” In other words, every act of Parliament was a part of the constitution, and all law, both customary and statutory, was thus constitutional. “Therefore,” said William Paley, that acute summarizer of common eighteenth-century British thought, “the terms constitutional and unconstitutional mean legal and illegal.”4
That was not at all what Adams thought in 1773. He realized that “many people had different ideas from the words legally and constitutionally.” The king and Parliament, he said, could do many things that were considered legal but were in fact unconstitutional. The problem was how to distinguish one from the other.5
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MORE SO THAN ADAMS, Jefferson from the outset was eager to separate these two words—“legal” and “constitutional”—keen to ensure that the fundamental law of the constitution would be different from statutes that were legal. In 1776, in the first draft of his proposed constitution for Virginia, he proposed that the constitution could not be repealed except “by the unanimous consent of both legislative houses,” a crude and impractical suggestion. By his second and third drafts, he had refined his thinking and now proposed that the constitution or “bill” be referred “to the people to be assembled in their respective counties and that the suffrages of two thirds of the counties shall be required to establish it,” the constitution then being unalterable “but by the personal consent of the people on summons to meet in their respective counties.” In 1776 he was the only one of his Virginia colleagues to object to the authority of the existing convention to frame a constitution without a new election.6
By 1779 Jefferson had become even more preoccupied with the problem of separating fundamental principles from statutory law. He knew from experience that no legislature “elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only” could restrain the acts of succeeding legislatures. Thus he realized that to declare his great Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia to be “irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free,” he wrote into his 1779 bill in frustration, “to declare, and do declare, that . . . if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present [act] or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.” All he could do, in other words, was place a curse on any future legislators who might violate his act.7
Jefferson realized that such a paper declaration was not enough and that something more was needed to protect natural rights and the fundamental laws of constitutions from legislative tampering. He was eager “to form a real constitution” for Virginia; the existing one, he said, was merely an “ordinance” with “no higher authority than the other ordinances of the same session.” He wanted a constitution that would be “perpetual” and “unalterable by other legislatures.” The only way that could be done was to have the constitution created, as he put it, “by a power superior to that of the legislature.” By the early 1780s, the answer had become clear. “To render a form of government unalterable by ordinary acts of assembly,” wrote Jefferson, “the people must delegate persons with special powers. They have accordingly chosen special conventions or congresses to form and fix their governments.”8 Moreover, the constitution had to be sent to the people for ratification.
• • •
MASSACHUSETTS HAD SHOWN THE WAY. It had demonstrated to the country the procedure by which a constitution could be created that was unalterable by ordinary statutory law. In 1779 the General Court authorized the election of a special convention to draft a new constitution. In order to further distinguish this constitution-making body from the regular legislature, for the election to this convention every male inhabitant over twenty-one years of age was allowed to vote—a broader suffrage than that for the legislature. Then the constitution had to be ratified by two-thirds of the state’s free males twenty-one years and older.
The convention began meeting in September 1779, a month following Adams’s return from Europe. A drafting committee of thirty named a subcommittee composed of James Bowdoin, president of the convention, Samuel Adams, and John Adams to draw up a constitution. This subcommittee turned over the writing of a draft to John Adams. Although it is clear that Adams was the principal framer of the constitution, he could not have done it alone. He returned to Europe in November 1779, and the convention continued to meet and revise the document until March 1780.
Although Adams drew on the other state constitutions drafted in 1776 and 1777—“so many fine Examples have been so recently set [before] Us”—the most important influences on him were the discussions he had with his Massachusetts colleagues—“this society of Worthies,” he called them—just after he had arrived back in the state.9 The Massachusetts leaders had been increasingly alarmed by the dissident thinking and behavior in the western part of the state, and had been pondering the nature of a new constitution for Massachusetts for several years. So Adams was joining a conversation about constitutionalism that had been going on all the while he had been away in Europe.
Despite saying that he was drawing on the examples of the state constitutions framed in 1776, Adams and his colleagues created a constitution that was very different from those. The Massachusetts leaders had come to realize that the constitutions of 1776 had granted too little authority to the executives and too much authority to the popular assemblies.
By 1780 it had become increasingly clear to many gentry-elites that all the state legislatures were abusing their power and creating democratic excesses in the states that few Whigs in 1776 had anticipated. The “democratic despotism” that Adams in 1775 had declared to be “a contradiction in terms” had become all too real. State legislatures were assuming the powers of the executive and the judiciary to themselves. And they were passing multiple and mutable laws that were also unjust, including various kinds of debtor relief legislation and paper money issues that were hurting creditors. These vices, as Jefferson’s friend James Madison put it, were bringing “into question the fundamental principle of republican Government, that the majority who rule in such governments are the safest Guardians both of public Good and private Rights.”10
Although by 1780 gentry-elites in most of the states were contemplating reform of their original state constitutions, only Massachusetts was able to draft a constitution that was in accord with the revised thinking; this was made possible by the fact that the state had delayed the constitution-making process and learned from the mistakes of the other states. Consequently, the Massachusetts constitution not only influenced the revisions of the other state constitutions in the late 1780s and early 1790s, but decisively affected the nature of the national Constitution of 1787.
There exists no manuscript copy of Adams’s draft of the Massachusetts constitution, so the printed Report of a Constitution that went to the convention is all we have. It was probably largely but certainly not entirely the work of Adams. This Report presented a constitution that was by far the longest and most detailed of the revolutionary constitutions.
At the beginning the draft report adopted the term “Commonwealth” instead of “State,” something that Virginia and Pennsylvania had done.11 It also set forth a declaration of rights, largely borrowed from those of other state constitutions, and incorporated it in the constitution itself as chapter I. The opening phrase, taken from the declarations of rights in the Virginia and Pennsylvania constitutions of 1776, stated that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” Although Adams was willing to borrow various passages from the 1776 Pennsylvania declaration of rights, he knew he would never borrow anything from the structure of that state’s government, especially its unicameral legislature and plural executive. In October 1779, while Adams was in the midst of writing the draft, Benjamin Rush, his friend from Pennsylvania, reminded him of his immediate response upon seeing a copy of the radical Pennsylvania constitution in 1776. “Good God! (said you) the people of Pensylvania in two years will be glad to petition the crown of Britain for reconciliation in order to be delivered from the tyranny of their constitution.”12
Consequently, Adams’s constitution created a structure of government that was very different from that of Pennsylvania. It provided for a bicameral legislature with a strong senate, and an independent judiciary whose members served during good behavior. The property qualifications for voting and holding office were considerably higher than those in the other states. Adams’s constitution also created a much more powerful and independent governor than existed in the other states. The governor, who was required to have an estate worth at least a thousand pounds, was to be annually elected by the people at large rather than by the legislature, as was the case in most of the other state constitutions. The constitution created a council of nine members to advise the governor in his executive duties; although this council was to be drawn from the forty annually elected senators, it, unlike the old colonial Council, had no legislative authority whatsoever. Eager to enhance executive authority, Adams granted the governor some of the prerogative powers that had been stripped from the executives in the state constitutions drafted in 1776. His draft gave the governor not only the authority, along with the governor’s council, to appoint judges, sheriffs, and militia officers, but, more important, the sole power to veto all laws passed by the legislature.13
Adams was especially proud of his section of the constitution that provided for the government’s positive role in encouraging education, the principles of humanity and general benevolence, literature, science, and the arts in both public and private institutions—all premised on the belief that “wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people [were] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.”14
• • •
ALTHOUGH MUCH OF THIS Report of a Constitution was the work of Adams, the full committee and the convention made some substantial changes in his draft. Not only did the convention formally divide the constitution into two parts, separating the declaration of rights from the frame of government, but it altered the opening phrase of the declaration of rights and transformed its meaning. Stating, as Adams had, that “all men are born equally free and independent” did not have quite the emphasis on equality that was in the Declaration of Independence or, for that matter, in Adams’s earlier statement of 1766, that “all men are born equal.”15
By 1779 Adams had lost much of his earlier enthusiasm for the enlightened view that all men were created equal; indeed, he was coming to believe the opposite—that all men were created unequal. That was too much for the convention, however, and so it changed his phrase to read that “all men are born free and equal”—a statement more in line with the Declaration of Independence.
Much more important to Adams was the change the convention made to the governor’s role in lawmaking. The convention balked at Adams’s desire to give the governor an absolute veto power over all legislation; instead, it granted the governor only a qualified veto power, which allowed two-thirds of each house of the legislature to override the governor’s veto. This denial of the absolute veto that Adams wanted, as Theophilus Parsons, an eminent lawyer from Essex County, privately explained, was a concession made “to please the People.”16
The convention also rejected Adams’s proposal that the governor could be annually reelected no more than five times over a period of seven years, and his suggestion that all officeholders be Christians. Instead the convention limited this second restriction to the governor and lieutenant governor, but at the same time inconsistently required all councilors and legislators to swear or affirm a belief in the truth of Christianity upon assuming their offices. The convention eliminated Adams’s reference to the right of free speech in the declaration of rights and did away with the right of the governor to appoint militia officers. The convention added some obvious things that Adams had overlooked, including the right of the house of representatives to judge the qualifications of its members, compensation for property taken for public uses, stipulating a quorum for the senate, and providing for amending the constitution.
These sorts of omissions came from the haste with which Adams worked. Also it is clear that he did not write certain sections of the Report. The most controversial part of the Report was article III, which stated that the government had the authority to provide at public expense for the public worship of God and for the support of teachers of religion. Although Adams claimed that he had nothing to do with this article, Isaac Backus, the celebrated leader of the Baptists in New England, later claimed that on the floor of the convention Adams had cited an incident from 1774 in which Backus and the Baptists had embarrassed the Massachusetts delegation at the Continental Congress, in order to inflame the convention and get it to vote for article III.17
• • •
OTHER ARTICLES IN THE DECLARATION of rights were lifted almost verbatim from other state constitutions, perhaps in some cases without much reflection. If Adams was the one who copied article V of the declaration of rights from the Pennsylvania and Virginia constitutions of 1776, for example, it appears that he hadn’t given much thought to its implications. The article read that “all power residing originally in the people, and being derived from them, the several magistrates and officers of government, vested with authority, whether legislative, executive or judicial, are their substitutes and agents, and are at all times accountable to them.” But as Adams set forth his thinking about mixed government, making all parts of the government substitutes and agents of the people was not what he believed at all—as his later exchanges with Samuel Adams, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and John Taylor of Virginia demonstrated. It was Taylor who most fully drew out the implications of having all members of the government considered as agents of the people, implications that were far more in accord with the sentiments of the American people than Adams’s fidelity to the English theory of mixed government.
The convention, anticipating Taylor, had none of Adams’s devotion to the traditional theory of mixed government, and in its Address, which it sent to the people in March 1780, it made very explicit the significance of conceiving of all the officers of government, executive as well as legislative, as substitutes and agents of the people. This Address appeared five months after Adams had gone back to France and was not his work at all.
Although Adams certainly would have agreed with the Address’s conventional emphasis on separating the executive, legislative, and judicial powers, he would probably not have labeled them, as the Address did, “the three capital powers of Government.” For Adams, the three capital powers of government remained the house of representatives, the senate, and the governor—embodying the three orders or powers of the society. Nor would he have agreed with the Address’s statement that “the Governor is emphatically the Representative of the whole People, being chosen not by one Town or County, but by the People at large.” For Adams, continuing to think in traditional terms of mixed or balanced government, the people were represented solely in the house of representatives. Adams believed that the governor embodied the one, the monarchical order in the society, and had to be independent of the people, not their representative.
It was precisely because Adams thought the governor stood for an order or an estate in the society that he had wanted an absolute veto given to him. “I am clear for Three Branches, in the Legislature,” he told Elbridge Gerry. “I am persuaded, We never shall have any Stability, Dignity, Decision, or Liberty without it.” The executive “ought to be the Reservoir of Wisdom, as the Legislature is of Liberty.” Without the weapon of a full voice in legislation, that is, an absolute veto, the executive “will be run down like a Hare before the Hunters.”18
The reason Adams wanted the executive to be a full-fledged member of the legislature was that the king of Great Britain was a full-fledged member of Parliament, and the English constitution was his model for the Massachusetts constitution. The English constitution with the king-in-Parliament was, he believed, “both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibrations, the most stupendous fabric of human invention.” “Americans,” he continued, “ought to be applauded instead of censured, for imitating it as far as they have done.” Even back in 1775 he had written in his Novanglus essays that if a republic was “a government of laws not of men,” as great thinkers like Aristotle and Harrington had contended, then “the British constitution is nothing more or less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate.”19
Of course, conceiving of the English constitution as a republic made it easier for Adams to adopt it as a model. Of all the revolutionary state constitutions, the Massachusetts constitution came closest to the English constitution. Even the judiciary was modeled on it. Although Adams had granted judges tenure during good behavior, he had also provided that they, like the English judges, could be removed by the governor and council “upon the address of both Houses of the legislature.” This was something less than the judicial independence touted by the constitution-makers in the other states.20
• • •
THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION that Adams admired in 1779 was the one interpreted by the Swiss jurist Jean Louis De Lolme in his La Constitution de l’Angleterre, first published in French at Amsterdam in 1771. Although Adams never mentioned De Lolme in drafting the Massachusetts constitution, he obviously had read his work and had been influenced by it.
De Lolme fundamentally revised Montesquieu’s earlier understanding of the English constitution and helped to change the thinking of Adams and others on the nature of mixed or balanced government. Although Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws had spent a good deal of time extolling the English constitution, De Lolme’s work was the first by a continental European devoted entirely to the subject. The first English translation of De Lolme’s book, The Constitution of England; or, An Account of the English Government, appeared in 1775, and the work went on to have multiple printings over the succeeding decades.21
In his 1748 Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu had accepted the conventional understanding of the English constitution as 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.22
Adams in his Thoughts on Government had likewise accepted this traditional view of the balance in the English constitution and had urged his countrymen to draft their state constitutions with this historic contest between the executive and the popular assembly in mind. “If the legislative power is wholly in one Assembly and the executive in another, or in a single person, these two powers,” he had written in this 1776 pamphlet, “will oppose and enervate upon each other, until the contest shall end in war, and the whole power, legislative and executive, be usurped by the strongest.” An upper house embodying the aristocracy of the society, he concluded, would mediate this contest and bring about a proper balance.23
Contrary to Montesquieu, De Lolme in his work emphasized that the basic struggle in English history was not between the monarch and the people, but was actually between the House of Commons, or the democracy, on the one hand and the House of Lords, or the aristocracy, on the other, with the crucial role in maintaining the proper balance being played by the king. This was a major innovation in thinking about the English constitution. A strong executive, De Lolme wrote, was the best check against the ambitions of the aristocracy, which always posed the greater threat to the stability of the constitution. Too much democracy did not lead to anarchy but to oligarchy or aristocracy. Without a powerful executive, the freedom and stability of the English constitution and presumably any other balanced constitution, De Lolme concluded, could not be maintained.24
With good reason did Adams call De Lolme’s book “the best defense of the political balance of three powers that was ever written.”25 He had closely followed De Lolme’s argument and in the process had fundamentally altered his thinking about the nature of the proper balance in a constitution. Adams now claimed that the principal conflict in society was between the people and the aristocracy, a conflict, according to reports he had received from his colleagues in the late 1770s, that was much more in accord with the realities of Massachusetts society and politics. That is why he was so insistent on a strong executive for the Massachusetts constitution, one who was a full and equal participant in the legislative process with an absolute negative over all legislation and one who could balance the aristocracy and the democracy embodied in the other branches of the legislature. But to Adams’s chagrin, the final constitution in chapter I, section I, article I, declared that “the department of legislation shall be formed by two branches,” which meant that the governor possessed only a limited veto power.26 Still, the executive in the Massachusetts constitution emerged as the strongest governor of any of the states.
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WHEN IT CAME TO CREATING the senate or upper house, Adams was much more indebted to his colleagues who had been wrestling with the problem for months. During the debate over the proposed constitution of 1778 in Massachusetts, Theophilus Parsons in the Essex Result, the publication of the Essex County convention, had spent a great deal of time discussing the difficulty of constructing an upper house. The proposed constitution of 1778 was defective, Parsons wrote, because it provided for the selection of the senate by all the freemen: “a trust is reposed in the people which they are unequal to.” If Massachusetts wanted a proper senate containing “the greatest wisdom, firmness, consistency, and perseverance,” it had to look beyond the common people. “These qualities,” said Parsons, who later became chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, “will most probably be found amongst men of education and fortune,” especially fortune. On behalf of the Essex convention, Parsons admitted that all men of property were not at present men of learning and wisdom, but surely, he said, it was among the wealthy that the largest number of men of education and character could be found. Hence the senate, declared the Essex convention, should represent the property of the state.27
Since the weakness of the senate was one of the reasons the proposed constitution of 1778 had been turned down, the convention of 1779–1780 was determined to remedy this defect. Adams had proposed that the senators had to own a freehold worth at least three hundred pounds. The convention doubled this amount to six hundred pounds and included personal property in the sum, thus opening up the office to wealthy individuals who may not have owned sufficient land. The Address of the convention went on to spell out the difference between the two houses in no uncertain terms: “The House of Representatives is intended as the Representatives of the Persons, and the Senate of the property of the Commonwealth.”28
Making the senate the overt representative of property severely distorted the meaning of mixed government that the state constitution-makers of 1776 had applied. The framers of the revolutionary state constitutions had hoped that their upper houses would embody the wisdom and learning of the society, not just property and wealth. In 1776 William Hooper of North Carolina had suggested that senators should be “selected for their Wisdom, remarkable Integrity, or that Weight which arises from property and gives Independence and Impartiality to the human mind.” 29 Although wisdom and integrity were difficult to measure, property was not. Out of frustration with the people’s inability to perceive the wise and truly talented, the states fell back on property as the best practical source of distinction for their state senates. Some of the states required members of their upper houses to have more property than members of the lower houses, while other states required the senatorial electors to have more property than those electing the houses of representatives. Thus many American leaders found in property a criterion by which the “senatorial part” of their society could be distinguished from ordinary people. By stating that the upper house represented property, the Massachusetts constitution made glaringly explicit what was only implicit in the other states.
Making property the measure of wisdom was not what most framers of the revolutionary state constitutions had expected. In his experience, Jefferson had noted in 1776, “Integrity” was not “the characteristic of wealth.”30 Adams agreed. He never said that his idea of a senate was simply to represent property; the explicit statement to that effect made in the convention’s Address to the people in 1780 was the view of his colleagues, not his view. Instead, for Adams the upper house embodied the aristocratic estate of the society, which, as he came to explain in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, included much more than mere property.
• • •
EVEN THOUGH BOTH Adams and Jefferson in the early 1780s were working for the Confederation Congress, their focus was still on their individual states. Indeed, with the end of the war in 1783, Jefferson thought the Congress had lost most of its usefulness. “The constant session of Congress,” he said, “can not be necessary in time of peace.” After clearing up the most urgent business, the delegates should “separate and return to our respective states, leaving only a Committee of the states,” and thus “destroy the strange idea of their being a permanent body, which has unaccountably taken possession of the heads of their constituents, and occasions jealousies injurious to the public good.”31
Certainly Jefferson’s mind was still on his own state of Virginia. At the very time Massachusetts was putting its new constitution into effect, he was thinking about reforming the Virginia constitution that had been adopted in 1776. Since “we were new and inexperienced in the science of government” in 1776, it was not surprising, he explained, “that time and trial have discovered very capital defects in it.” The most important defect lay in the nature and behavior of the legislature. It had concentrated within itself all the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, which, said Jefferson, was “precisely the definition of despotism.” The fact that the legislature was composed of many hands did not mitigate the problem: “173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one,” he observed.32
Adams and many of the other leaders in Massachusetts and elsewhere would have agreed with this assessment. That was why they favored a stronger executive and a stronger senate. But their reforms came from a growing mistrust of the people at large. The assemblies were behaving tyrannically because they were only too representative of the people and their partial and narrow interests.
Jefferson believed the opposite. He had not lost faith in the people themselves. He assumed the assemblies, although elected, were not really the people; these elected legislatures had drifted away from the people and were not carrying out the people’s true wishes. He was especially critical of some of his colleagues in the Virginia legislature who twice had panicked and called for a dictator to save them. Did they believe, he said, that the people of Virginia had substituted fear for virtue as their motivating principle? He knew that republicanism was risky and required an educated populace. Every government, including Virginia’s, contained “some germ of corruption,” and “when trusted to the rulers of the people alone” it was bound to degenerate. “The people themselves therefore are its only depositories.”33
In Virginia the suffrage was too limited; “the majority of the men in the state who pay and fight for its support are unrepresented in the legislature.” And “among those who share the representation, the shares are very unequal.”34 Counties in the western parts of the state did not have representation in proportion to their population. Unlike most reformers in the 1780s, Jefferson believed that a fuller and more equitable representation of the people could alleviate the problem of legislative abuses. He was one of those who paid little or no attention to what Madison later called that “essential distinction, too little heeded,” between governments that became oppressive by opposing the will of the people and those governments that became oppressive by only too accurately embodying the will of the people.35 For Jefferson the people themselves could never become oppressive; only their elected agents were capable of tyranny.
Jefferson was unable to persuade his Virginia colleagues to reform the state’s 1776 constitution. Although equally unsuccessful, reformers in the other states, especially in Pennsylvania, did not cease trying to bring their constitutions more in line with the more conservative Massachusetts constitution of 1780. Only with the adoption of the new federal Constitution in 1787 were some states, but not Virginia, able to reform their constitutions.
• • •
THE FRENCH WERE FASCINATED by all these American state constitutions. Soon after Benjamin Franklin arrived in France in 1776, he arranged with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt to have the state constitutions translated into French. At least five different editions of the constitutions were published in France between 1776 and 1786. By 1784 Adams noted that “the Philosophers are speculating upon our Constitutions.” He hoped that they “will throw out Hints, which will be of Use to our Countrymen.”36
That same year, the British dissenting minister Richard Price published in London his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World, and it was promptly republished in Boston. At the end of this pamphlet, Price included a letter he had earlier received from the French philosophe and former minister to Louis XVI Baron Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, who had died in 1781. In this 1778 letter, Turgot had criticized the revolutionary state constitutions drafted in 1776. Too many of them, he said, were based on the English constitution. “Instead of bringing all the authorities into one, that of the nation, they have established different bodies, a House of Representatives, a Council, a Governor, because England has a House of Commons, an House of lords, and a King.” The constitution-makers, he said, had misunderstood what republics required. Monarchies, Turgot said, may have needed “different authorities” to balance and offset “the enormous preponderance of royalty,” but republics, “formed on the equality of all citizens,” had no such need. Indeed, by constituting “different bodies” in their governments, the Americans had created “a source of divisions.” In other words, “by striving to prevent imaginary dangers, they have created real ones.”37
Turgot had a point. In 1776 most Americans rather unthinkingly had followed the English example in creating bicameral legislatures and separate governors. Their experience with their colonial constitutions, which they had regarded as miniature copies of the English constitution, and the influence of Adams’s Thoughts on Government, had dictated the structure of their new republics. But unlike Turgot or Adams, by creating such mixed constitutions most Americans had not assumed they were incorporating different bodies or estates in their governments; they simply had not thought through the implications of what they were doing.
When challenged on this issue that they were creating estates or separate bodies in their constitutions in the manner of the English constitution, most Americans began offering very different justifications of their bicameral legislatures and independent governors. By the 1780s it was becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for political leaders in America to justify their mixed and balanced constitutions as embodying estates or powers of the society. It was Adams’s unfortunate fate never to fully grasp this new development.
Reformers of the controversial Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, for example, very much wanted to replace the unicameral assembly with a legislature that contained a senate as well as a lower house. But as soon as they voiced this reform, defenders of the original constitution accused them of being “a junto of gentlemen in Philadelphia, who wished to trample upon the farmers and mechanics, to establish a wicked aristocracy, and to introduce a House of Lords, hoping to become members of it.” In response, the critics of the unicameral legislature denied any intention of foisting an aristocracy on the state. Instead, they argued that the upper house was necessary only as a means of checking the power of a single legislature. It had no social significance whatsoever. It would simply be “a double representation of the people.” The two houses “would both draw their power from the same source—from the people, the fountain of all authority.” Therefore they would not have opposite interests, but only the single interest of the people. The very thing that Jefferson and others had worried about—the homogeneity of interests between the two houses in a bicameral legislature—was now celebrated as a good thing.38
Others began drawing out the implications of having a double representation of the people. If the people could be represented twice, why couldn’t they be represented three or more times? It was this extraordinary expansion of the idea of representation that enabled the Massachusetts convention in 1780 to label the governor, simply because he was elected by the people at large, “emphatically the Representative of the whole People.”39 The process of popular election by itself made an official a representative of the people.
Everywhere in the states in the early 1780s, the traditional theory of mixed government was fast giving way to the idea that all parts of the state governments were in some way or another representatives of the people. Although Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia had complained that the senate in Virginia, “being chosen by the same electors, at the same time, and out of the same subjects,” was “too homogeneous with the house of delegates,” he had no admiration whatsoever for the English constitution and did not see the senate as embodying any sort of aristocratic order or estate. Because in his Summary View pamphlet of 1774 he had declared that “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people,” he was already primed to think of all officers of government as representatives of the people.40
• • •
JOHN ADAMS WAS A CONSPICUOUS EXCEPTION to all these popularizing developments. No American was more infatuated with the English constitution; even his old radical Whig English friend Thomas Brand Hollis chided him for being so excessively fond of the English constitution, especially since Hollis believed that it had become defective and unbalanced.41 Certainly Adams more than any other American leader clung tightly to the traditional theory that underlay the English constitution—that the three powers or orders of society were embodied in all governments that contained bicameral legislatures and independent executives.
Because most Americans were rapidly abandoning the English theory of mixed government or had never firmly grasped it in the first place, they paid little or no attention to Turgot’s criticism of their constitutions. Adams, however, was different. Being enamored of the English constitution and knowing exactly what Turgot was getting at, he was outraged by the Frenchman’s criticism. Since he rightly believed that he had been most responsible for the form and structure of the revolutionary state constitutions, he took Turgot’s criticism personally. In fact, he claimed “that Mr. Turgot’s crude idea is really a personal attack upon me, whether he knew it or not.” Therefore, it was only proper, he said, that the defense of the constitutions should come from Adams himself.42
The result was his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America—that huge, three-volume, jumbled conglomeration of political glosses on a single theme. No government, Adams contended, could long remain stable and free unless it placed each of the principal social orders—the people and the aristocracy—in separate houses of the legislature and balanced them by an independent executive. The common people he knew about, from his background in Braintree and his law practice, if from nothing else, and he was well aware of their anarchical passions. All history was full of examples of the people robbing and plundering the rich. It was evident that the people, unrestrained, were “as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous, and cruel as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power.”43 Nevertheless, it was the aristocracy that he was most worried about.
• • •
ADAMS HAD BEEN THINKING ABOUT writing a book on aristocracy for several years, certainly by the early 1780s, when Jefferson first joined him in Paris.44 In 1813 he reminded Jefferson how both of them in 1784 had spent “a whole evening” in Jefferson’s apartments being “harrangued” by the Marquis de Lafayette on “the plans then in Operation to reform France.” Adams recalled being “astonished at the Grossness of his Ignorance of Government and History.” It was what others—“Turgot, Rochefaucault, Condorcet, and Franklin”—had been saying for years. “This gross Ideology” of all those Frenchmen and those Frenchified liberals like Franklin—their obsession with democracy and a single-house legislature—was what “first suggested” to him the “thought and inclination . . . of writing Something upon Aristocracy.”45
But listening to Lafayette and reading the likes of Turgot could never by themselves have provoked Adams’s fascination with the subject of aristocracy. He had read so much history—more, surely, than any other American of his generation—and all that history, from ancient Rome to Renaissance Italy and eighteenth-century England, had stressed over and over the inevitability of patricians distinguishing themselves from plebeians. For a moment in early 1786 he thought that this social distinction might not be inevitable after all; indeed, perhaps it could even be eliminated.
In a letter written on January 21, 1786, to his eccentric French friend Count Sarsfield, Adams said that he had “half a mind to devote the next ten years to the making of a book on the subject of nobility.” He wished “to inquire into the practice of all nations, ancient and modern, civilized and savage, under all religions,—Mahometan, Christian, and Pagan,—to see how far the division of mankind into patricians and plebeians, nobles and simple, is necessary and inevitable, and how far it is not.” If this distinction was man-made, created by art, then perhaps, he told Sarsfield, it could be unmade, which would be a good thing.46
This notion that aristocracy might be done away with by artful means was for Adams a momentary fancy tossed off playfully to a friend. Once he got serious about his inquiry into the nature of aristocracy, he quickly concluded that such patricians not only were inevitable in every society but were based on the inequality of people that was rooted in nature.
Of course, there was nothing really new or unusual about Adams’s division of the society into the few and many, into gentlemen and commoners, aristocrats and democrats. Many Americans in the 1780s believed that every developed society always divided into the few and the many and that each needed to defend itself against the other. “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few,” said Alexander Hamilton in 1787. “Give all power to the few they will oppress the many.”47 By the 1780s the conflict between gentlemen and commoners had become conventional wisdom for many northern elites, but it had become increasingly politically incorrect to contend publicly that each house of a bicameral legislature should embody these two social contestants.
Adams distinguished himself from his contemporaries by his obvious willingness to boldly and publicly admit the need to represent the social orders in separate houses of the legislatures. But even more important in setting himself apart from his colleagues was his conviction that since the social division between aristocrats and commoners was inevitable and existed in every society, it needed to be understood scientifically. That is why his Defence of the Constitutions spent little or no time analyzing the American state constitutions themselves. In Adams’s mind it was enough to demonstrate that their structure was based on a scientifically established principle of government that encompassed different peoples over centuries of time. “Nations,” he said, “move by unalterable rules,” by the same kinds of laws and regularities as the heavenly bodies.48
Others may have taken the social division between gentlemen and commoners for granted, but he wanted to know where this pervasive difference between the few and the many, the rich and the poor, came from. Why did some people always emerge as aristocrats while others remained as commoners? Adams, in effect, was trying to work out his own “iron law of oligarchy.”49
• • •
HIS IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY was reinforced by his personal experience with snobbery and inequality. He knew what aristocrats were like, not just those he experienced in Europe but also those he knew in America. As a young aspiring lawyer, he had resented “all the great Notions of high Family” displayed by the Winslows, Hutchinsons, Leonards, Saltonstalls, and Chandlers; and he hated their presumption of superiority, for, he said, it was “vain and mean to esteem oneself for his Ancestors Merit.”50 Even as the Revolution made him one of the gentry-aristocratic leaders, his resentment of aristocracy continued to haunt him. Those who considered themselves his social superiors, he believed, had envied his outspokenness in the Continental Congress in the 1770s, and in subsequent years they had continued to throw out hints about the lowness of his birth and obscurity of his ancestry.
Although Adams always said that he was the last man in the world to claim any benefit in favor of blood, he was proud of his ancestry, and he was deeply angered by all the aspersions cast upon it. He believed his ancestry was comparable “with the Descent of any of the Grandees of any Part of America.” He was bitter “at the low Cunning and mean Craft of those who talk and Scribble upon this Subject” of ancestry. But he was also angry “at the Meanness and Inconsistency of the American public for tolerating this Insolence and much more for encouraging it.” In Adams’s mind his behavior had been so virtuous that his enemies had nothing else “but lies about his Birth and Conduct, to get him out of the Way.” The accumulation of resentments over the years lay behind much of his obsession with aristocracy.51
Even his own relatively egalitarian state of Massachusetts possessed aristocrats whose self-interestedness and power always impressed him. He was keenly aware of the social conflict between creditors and debtors in Massachusetts and saw how the state’s elites exerted their powerful influence in handling it, especially during those several months in 1779 when he was drafting the state’s new constitution.
From at least 1774 on, many farmers in the western counties of Massachusetts had been in a state of virtual rebellion. In Hampshire County the courts had been closed since 1774 and did not open again until 1778; in Berkshire County the courts did not open until the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 had gone into effect. Even after the formation of the new state constitution, extralegal committees and conventions continued to protest the existence of the senate and the overwhelming hard-money interests of eastern creditors in the government.
These eastern gentry-creditors, fearful of the social unrest and debtor protests, had influenced the design of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, especially in creating the peculiar character of the senate as the representation of property. As the principal drafter of the constitution, Adams had felt their intense pressure to shape the senate to their liking. In 1779 he had seen the Massachusetts east-coast gentry up close, men such as John Lowell, George Cabot, Nathaniel Tracy, Jonathan Jackson, and Theophilus Parsons, many from Essex County, and he had been fascinated by the way in which they had exerted their influence in establishing the Massachusetts senate in the face of much popular opposition. Out of that experience Adams had come to appreciate more fully than ever before the power and influence of the aristocracy in public life. At the same time, he had come to realize that unless constrained and segregated, the rich and wellborn might pose an even greater danger to free government than the common people.
• • •
SUDDENLY JEAN DE LOLME’S new understanding of the English constitution as a struggle between aristocracy and democracy took on a heightened meaning for Adams. De Lolme’s suggestion that the aristocracy was more dangerous than the democracy obviously impressed him. But he was not the only Massachusetts man to read De Lolme and experience the social conflict that lay behind the writing of the Massachusetts constitution.
Beginning in 1784, twenty-eight-year-old Benjamin Lincoln Jr., a Harvard graduate, son of the Revolutionary War general Benjamin Lincoln, and one of the eastern elites, published a series of articles under the pseudonym of “The Free Republican” that anticipated John Adams’s Defence at nearly every major point.52
“Two distinct and different orders of men,” Lincoln had written, “seems incident to every society,” and these “two contending interests,” fed by a “spirit of jealousy and distrust,” would always be in dispute with each other. “Whether the parties to the contests style themselves the Rich and the Poor, the Great and the Small, the High and the Low, the Elders and People, Patricians and Plebeians, Nobility and Commons, still,” Lincoln had claimed, “the source and effects of the dispute are the same.” This continual struggle between these two social interests—the many and the few—had “occasioned the greater part of those civil wars, with the sad relation of which the histories of the antient and modern nations of the world so generally abound.”53
The common people or the many, wrote Lincoln, were those who possessed only the rights of persons; their “subsistence is derived from their bodily labours.” The gentlemen or the few, on the other hand, were those who obtained “their riches and support, not from their own, but the labours of others.” These men of property, wrote Lincoln, who certainly saw himself as one of this group, were “the merchant, the physician, the lawyer and the divine, and in a word, all of every kind whose subsistence is not derived from the labours of their body.” Because the few gentry derived their support from the same source—that is, the labor of others—they collaborated and supported one another. “As a union of interests is the strongest cement of friendship, we find them, not only united in publick life, but associating together in private.” Since these gentlemen possessed a sense of superiority and seldom stooped except with reluctance, they rarely associated with the laboring many and inevitably courted the society of their own genteel kind.54
Although these two social contestants had different names at different times, “with us,” said Lincoln, “they are described by the gentlemen and the common people.” Adams in his Defence agreed. All societies, Adams said, were “naturally divided into two sorts, the gentlemen and the simplemen, a word here chosen to signify the common people.”55 Both Adams and Lincoln included the middling sort among the common people.
To us today, the designation of gentleman scarcely seems to represent anything similar to an aristocracy, let alone a separate social order. But for that very different eighteenth century the title of gentleman was very meaningful and even carried legal significance. For Adams and for young Lincoln, the distinction of being a gentleman was not just a convenient social label as it was for some. They saw it as something central to the organization of society; the aristocracy was a republican-style estate that required representation in a separate branch of the legislatures.56
This American aristocracy, however, was very different from that of Europe. European nobles, said Adams, had more pride, “that kind of pride which looks down on commerce and manufacturing as degrading.” Perhaps this contempt for commerce, he said, played a useful role in Europe. Maybe it helped prevent the European nobility from becoming too rich and inhibited its acquiring too large a proportion of landed property. Or the aristocracy’s valuing honor over money might have saved the European nations from being completely consumed by avarice. But in America such pretensions, such disdain for the making of money, said Adams, not only would be “mischievous” but would expose the aristocrats “to universal ridicule and contempt.” The American aristocracy’s preoccupation with money distinguished it from the European aristocracy and was one of its weaknesses.
Other European “hauteurs,” such as “keeping the commons at a distance and distaining to converse with any but a few” of their own aristocratic kind, while impossible to pull off in America, survived in the Old World because they relieved the common people of a multitude of humiliating and troublesome compliances. This distance between the nobility and commoners in Europe may have helped prevent the aristocrats there from caballing with the people and influencing elections. But in America such a separation between gentry and commoners, such expressions of aristocratic snobbery, said Adams, “would justly excite universal indignation. . . . No such airs will ever be endured.”
Despite America’s aristocrats being less arrogant than their European counterparts, however, they turned out to be more sly and devious. By downplaying their distinctiveness and pretending that they were no different from the common people, the American gentry, said Adams, actually exerted more influence over their society than did the European aristocrats.57
Despite these differences between the European and American aristocracies, both Lincoln and Adams believed that American society, like that of Europe, was basically divided between two coherent social orders of gentlemen and commoners and that these two orders were in constant conflict with each other. Both writers offered the same solution to the conflict: each of the contending social interests had to be embodied in a separate house of the legislature, with the executive granted an unqualified negative over all legislation in order to preserve a balance between the two houses.
“A balance,” wrote Lincoln, “supposes three things, the two scales, and the hand that holds it.” Adams could not have put it better; indeed, he used the same image in the Defence, both he and Lincoln borrowing the figure directly from a 1701 piece by Jonathan Swift.58 Only “three different orders of men,” watching and balancing one another, said Adams, could preserve the constitution. Every legislature had to have separate chambers, one for the few on the top and another for the many on the bottom of the society, an organizing, segregating, and balancing of the two basic social estates, mediated by a third estate, an independent executive who shared in the lawmaking—that is, who possessed an absolute veto over all legislation. The perfect constitution, said Adams, was “the tripartite balance, the political trinity in unity, trinity of legislative, and unity of executive power, which in politics is no mystery.”59
• • •
SINCE BENJAMIN LINCOLN JR.’S description of a constant struggle between the many and few in all societies was so close to Adams’s later account in his Defence, and since there is no evidence that Adams ever read Lincoln—he certainly never mentioned “The Free Republican” in his papers—both political analyses had to have come from a common source, a common Massachusetts experience.60 Both young Lincoln and Adams were clearly privy to the conversations and opinions of the eastern creditors who were involved in creating the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 and its aristocratic senate designed to protect eastern gentry-property against the radicalism of the western debtor farmers.
Adams certainly favored a strong senate, but his idea of what the senate was supposed to stand for was broader than simply protecting the property of the creditors against the rapaciousness of the people. Although Lincoln admitted that the few rich should never be in a position to deprive the commoners of their share in government and he voiced some concern over the power of the few over the many, he generally had a more generous attitude toward the aristocracy than Adams. Lincoln identified with the east-coast creditor-elites, and like them he was far more obsessed with property than Adams. He maintained that the security of property must “be ranked among the first objects of civil society” and that “men possessed of property are entitled to a greater share of political authority than those who are destitute of it.”61
Adams never made claims for property in this blunt and barefaced manner, and he never said the rich deserved a greater share of political authority than the common people. Instead, more often than not, he repeatedly voiced apprehensions over the overweening power and influence of the aristocracy. “The great and perpetual distinction in civilized societies,” he said over and over, “has been between the rich who are few, and the poor who are many.” The struggle between the patricians and the plebeians was constant. But ultimately the few patricians generally outmaneuvered and outwitted the many plebeians. “The few have had most art and union, and therefore have generally prevailed in the end.”62
He said in 1787 that he no longer shared Jefferson’s conventional Whig fear of where the major threat to liberty lay. “You,” he told Jefferson, “are afraid of the one—I, of the few. . . . You are apprehensive of Monarchy, I, of Aristocracy.” Both of us, he said, “agreed perfectly that the many should have a full fair and perfect Representation” in the various houses of representation. Unlike the ancients, Adams had no desire whatsoever to exclude ordinary working people from citizenship. But Adams knew that he and Jefferson differed over the power to be granted the other two elements in the government. Whereas Jefferson wanted to reduce the power of executives, Adams said he would enhance the power of the executives and reduce that of the senates. For Adams it was the few, “the rich, the well-born, and the able,” who, with their heightened sense of avarice and ambition, were the social order most dangerous to liberty and the stability of the society.63
Adams’s fear that aristocrats were more threatening to society than kings came from his previous experience with the rich, the wellborn, and the able, reinforced by his extensive reading in history. As someone of middling origins who had made it to the top of the society, he necessarily had an ambivalent view of aristocracy. He certainly realized these gentlemen-aristocrats—2 to 12 percent of American society, with fewer in the South than in the North—generally represented the best the society could offer in honor and wisdom.
These few gentry may have been wealthy, but if they were to be ideal aristocrats Adams knew that they should not be preoccupied with work and the making of money. A thoroughly commercial people like the Dutch, he said, were not really aristocratic. They lacked the aristocratic passions—“the Love of Fame, the Desire for Glory, the Love of Country, the regard for Posterity, in short, all the brilliant and sublime Passions”—and they were therefore uninspiring and dull and interested in “nothing but the Love of Ease and Money.” The problem with the Dutch, said Adams in a revealing remark, was that they were “not Ambitious, and therefore happy.”64 Happiness, Adams realized, was never to be his lot in life.
It was precisely because he himself was so possessed by those aristocratic passions, especially ambition and the love of fame, that he feared aristocrats. The aristocrats, he said, were so driven and were so powerful that they “acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.” How then, Adams asked, “shall the legislator avail himself of their influence for the equal benefit of the public? And how, on the other hand, shall he prevent them from disturbing the public happiness?” Only by taking “the most illustrious” of these rich and wellborn aristocrats and separating them “from the mass” and placing them by themselves in a senate, only then could the nation “have the benefit of their wisdom, without fear of their passions.” This was to all intents and purposes, said Adams, “an ostracism.”65
• • •
ADAMS WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE whose presumed fear of the aristocracy led to a desire to have the aristocrats isolated in a separate branch of the legislature. In 1787 Gouverneur Morris, the wealthy New Yorker representing Pennsylvania, made the same argument in the Constitutional Convention. Morris wanted an upper house that would exclusively represent property holders, but, he declared, placing the property-holding aristocrats in a separate house was not to protect them but only to limit their power. The rich, said Morris, would always “strive to establish their dominion & enslave the rest.” If they mixed with “the poor” in a single house, they would overawe the commoners and “establish an Oligarchy.” Yet if the “aristocratic interest” could be secluded in a separate branch of the legislature, “the popular interest will be combined against it.” There would then be “a mutual check and mutual security.”66
An ingenious argument, but for Morris, an aristocrat to his core, it was no doubt a disingenuous one. Later in the Convention Morris revealed his concerns more clearly. He invoked the fear of aristocracy once again but now as a means of justifying limitations on who could vote. He suggested that giving the suffrage to all freemen, including people who had no property, would only contribute to the aristocracy’s domination of the government. Those voters without property, he said, will sell their votes “to the rich who will be able to buy them.”67
Benjamin Lincoln Jr., in his “Free Republican” essays of 1785–1786, had made similar arguments. The few rich, he said, were dangerous because they could never be kept down. “Power, or the ability of controlling others, ever has been, and ever will be attached to property. . . . The glare of wealth, and the splendor of its favours” created an influence which was almost impossible to control. “Let us therefore,” Lincoln concluded, “regulate an evil we cannot prevent.” Segregate the few in a separate house of the legislature.68
Both Morris and young Lincoln were wellborn aristocrats whose arguments for ostracizing the wealthy in upper houses seem more self-serving than Adams’s. They didn’t really fear the aristocracy the way Adams did; they were much more interested than Adams in protecting their property from rapacious commoners.
Adams’s difference from Morris, who was a scion of one of the wealthiest and most distinguished families in New York, probably goes without saying. But even in the case of young Lincoln, Adams’s social status was different. Adams’s view of the Massachusetts senate differed from Lincoln’s because he had a different relationship to the eastern gentry-elites of the state than Lincoln did.
As the son of a prominent Revolutionary War general, Lincoln was born a full-fledged member of the eastern aristocracy; Adams was not. Shortly before his untimely death at thirty-one, Lincoln had married Mary Otis, youngest daughter of the revolutionary patriot James Otis, and was moving in genteel circles with many powerful political and judicial figures, including Francis Dana, Edmund Trowbridge, and other members of what the followers of Thomas Jefferson later called the “Essex Junto.” Young Lincoln had become a Freemason in one of the most prestigious lodges in Massachusetts; Adams never became a Mason. Adams never liked such aristocratic fraternities; he believed that the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization of former revolutionary army officers whose Massachusetts chapter was headed by Lincoln’s father, was “against the Spirit of our Government and the Genius of our People.”69
Adams never felt fully at ease with the Cabots and Lowells, and he never shared Lincoln’s confidence in these eastern gentry. The intermarrying aristocrats from Essex County were generally far richer and better born than he, and their often arrogant manner put him off. While he was away serving his country, they were amassing wealth from their mercantile and legal practices and from interest on their money out on loan.
Although Adams counted many of these aristocrats as friends and acquaintances, he was troubled by their blatant self-interestedness and their preoccupation with their prosperity and property. His relationship with these Massachusetts gentry became much worse after he became president and especially after he retired and began supporting some Jeffersonian policies that these aristocratic conservatives bitterly opposed. This Massachusetts experience—what Abigail called “the insolence of wealth” in the state—was a principal source of his mistrust of the few.70
• • •
AS SUCCESSFUL AS HE WAS, Adams never entirely shed his middling origins and he never accepted the aristocratic sense that those who were rich and wellborn were naturally entitled to high political office. In the traditional society of prerevolutionary America, wealth and social distinction generally had been prerequisites to holding superior political offices. Consequently, access to government had often come quickly and easily to those who had the necessary social credentials. So wealthy Thomas Hutchinson became a Boston selectman and a member of the General Court at age twenty-six and began at once to amass political offices. That was just as true of Jefferson. Following his marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson emerged as one of the wealthiest planters in colonial Virginia. Whatever Jefferson’s considerable talents may have been, his wealth and social rank alone entitled him to a prominent position in Virginia’s government.
Adams was different. His family connections were meager, and he deeply resented the veneration for family that he saw all around him. “Go into every village in New England,” he said, “and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most.”71 Unlike Jefferson, Adams was a “new man”; he was completely a product of the Revolution in a way that Jefferson was not. Adams in his rise to public office dramatically reversed the relationship between social and political authority that existed in the traditional prerevolutionary society. In his case, his positions in government were the principal source of his social rank, not the other way around, as was the case with Jefferson, Washington, and many other leaders. For them their preexisting social preeminence and wealth gave them their claim, their entitlement, to high political office.
Precisely because Adams was not rich and did not possess outside sources of income from rents, interest, or slaves, he emphatically rejected the two-thousand-year-old classical tradition of aristocratic public service. In an ideal republican world, it was assumed that government officeholders would transcend economic interests and would serve without salary.
Washington was always concerned with his reputation for disinterestedness and had determined not to be paid a salary as commander in chief. Benjamin Franklin in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 proposed that all members of the executive branch, from the president on down, should serve without pay. Jefferson was also committed to a classical republican view of office holding, which should be, he said, in accord with what he called “the Roman principle.” “In a virtuous government,” he claimed, “public offices are, what they should be, burthens to those appointed to them, which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor, and great private loss.” Public employment contributed “neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one’s family and affairs.” In fact, the very drudgery of office and the bare “subsistence” provided for officeholders in a republic were, said Jefferson, “a wise & necessary precaution against the degeneracy of the public servants.”72
Adams was in no position financially to accept this ancient tradition of public service, and in an extraordinary series of letters to his radical English friend John Jebb in 1785, he released all his pent-up anger at those rich aristocrats who claimed a virtuous superiority because they served the public without pay.
He was keenly aware, he said, that “the Word ‘disinterested’ turns the Heads of the People by exciting their Enthusiasm.” By “disinterested,” of course, he did not mean uninterested, as we usually do today; instead, he meant being impartial and possessing the capacity to rise above selfish interests—the meaning that Washington always gave to the term. Adams deeply resented Washington’s serving as commander in chief without salary and his constant claim of being disinterested. Washington, he said, should have been paid a salary. “Would it Lessen his Reputation? Why Should it?” If “the People were perfectly judicious,” paying him a salary would have enhanced his reputation. “But if it did not surely the late revolution was not undertaken to raise one Great reputation to make a sublime Page in History, but for the Good of the People.” Besides, Washington’s example was dangerous. Knaves would take advantage of such promises to serve without salary. Such men would make the people believe that they were “perfectly disinterested” until they gained the people’s confidence and excited their enthusiasm, and then they would “Carry that Confidence and Enthusiasm to market.”
Rarely did Adams express more passion than he did in these letters to Jebb. To avoid the evils of a wealthy and overweening aristocracy, Adams, who certainly saw himself as one of the gentlemen-aristocrats, insisted that officeholders had to be paid a salary. If “no Man should hold an office who had not Private income sufficient for the subsistence and prospects of himself and family,” he knew only too well what the consequence would be: “all offices would be monopolized by the rich—the Poor and the Middling Ranks would be excluded and an Aristocratical Despotism would immediately follow.”73
From the outset of his career, he had seen these arrogant, wealthy aristocrats up close. Even after the expulsion of the Loyalists, rich families continued to dominate Massachusetts politics. The main reason he had wanted an absolute veto for the governor in 1779 was to counter the influence of the wealthy wellborn of the state. He told Elbridge Gerry in November 1780 that Massachusetts society had “so many Men of Wealth, of ambitious Spirits, of Intrigue, of Luxury and Corruption, that incessant Factions will disturb our Peace, without it.”74 Obviously, Adams viewed these Massachusetts elites ambivalently—with good reason: many of them eventually became his bitter enemies.
• • •
ADAMS PUT ALL THESE FEARS and anxieties over the social conflict he saw in America in the 1780s into what he told Jefferson was a “hazardous Enterprise”—his Defence of the United States constitutions. It became the work that he had intended to write on aristocracy, surely one of the most challenging subjects for any American then or now to write about.75
Adams began writing the Defence in October 1786 and completed the bulk of the first volume by the end of the year. He worked rapidly and drew extensively from a wide variety of sources—from historians, philosophers, and political theorists going back to the ancients. That haste and his habit of inserting many of his sources verbatim into the work lay behind the labored and ponderous style of his writing. His letters and diary were spontaneous expressions of his feelings and were always colorful and pungent. But, as the historian Zoltán Haraszti pointed out years ago, Adams lacked the patience to write longer sustained works of intellectual argument. Adams claimed that he didn’t know how to revise, amend, correct, and polish his writing. He was so eager to get his thoughts on the page that in composing the Defence he was unable to digest his many sources and thus he failed to make his writing the product of his mind alone. “My great misfortune, through a pretty long life,” he later admitted, “has been, that I have never had time to make my poor productions shorter.”76
Nevertheless, Adams did display in his Defence a degree of erudition and knowledge of Western culture that few could match. In the preface to the first volume, Adams outlined his main theme of the need to balance the three orders of society in government if civil war was to be avoided. He framed the bulk of the volume as a series of fifty-five letters to his son-in-law, William Stephens Smith. In these letters he traced the history of two dozen or so different republics, including democratical, aristocratical, and monarchical republics. He indiscriminately added letters on the ideas of various philosophers, ranging from Plato and Polybius to Machiavelli and Harrington.
The material was hastily put together, badly organized, and ill digested. Three-quarters of the book consisted of lengthy quotations from other works, some of them carelessly translated and some unattributed. He believed that his argument “would be more useful and effectual” if he laid “facts, principles, examples, and reasoning” before his readers “from the writings of others than my own name.” Unfortunately, he admitted, this borrowing from other writers had “given an air of Pedantry” to his work, but, he said, this was better than to have “contrived with more art, to promote my own reputation.”77
This first volume was published at Adams’s expense in London in January 1787. Adams sent copies to ten or so individuals, including Jefferson. He also sent a hundred copies to his wife’s uncle, Cotton Tufts, instructing him to present two dozen copies to particular persons, with the rest to be turned over to a Boston bookseller. The volume arrived in the United States in mid-April 1787.
The timing was perfect. By more or less coinciding with the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising of several thousand debtor farmers in western Massachusetts, and with the creation of the new federal Constitution, the book was greeted favorably, at least at first.
Indeed, some New Englanders thought his volume had contributed to the antipopulist atmosphere that helped create the Constitution. In March 1788 James Freeman, a Boston clergyman with Unitarian leanings, sent a copy of the Massachusetts ratification debates to a fellow clergyman in London. He warned his correspondent that the Constitution was “less democratick, than might be expected from a people who are so fond of liberty.” Freeman suggested that among the causes that had “conspired to render republican sentiments unfashionable” were “a late insurrection in the state of Massachusetts, . . . the corrupt proceedings of the legislature of Rhode Island,” and “Mr. J. Adams’s publications.”78
With doubts about republicanism at a fever pitch in Massachusetts, praise from friends and relatives flooded in on him. Cotton Tufts thought that Adams’s “Description of the Miseries of an unbalanced Democracy, is well calculated to serve as a Beacon to warn the People here of the Ruin that awaits them.”79 Abigail’s brother-in-law, Richard Cranch, told him that the “Litterati” of Massachusetts were “amazed at the vastness of your Reading on the subject of Legislation and Government.”80 Because Adams’s suggested ideal structure of government—with a bicameral legislature and an independent executive that shared in the law-making authority—closely matched that in the new federal Constitution, the Defence was warmly applauded; it seemed to be as much a defense of that new national Constitution as of the several state constitutions. With such praise it’s not surprising that Adams immediately began working on a second and third volume.
From the outset, however, Adams sensed that his Defence would sooner or later get him in trouble with his countrymen. He told Benjamin Franklin that the work was his “confession of political faith, and if it is heresy, I shall, I suppose, be cast out of communion. But it is the only sense in which I am or ever was a Republican.” “Popularity,” he said to his friend James Warren, “was never my Mistress, nor was I ever, or shall I ever be a popular Man. This Book will make me unpopular.”81
He had every reason to worry, for his Defence offered a devastating view of his fellow Americans.