At Law & Liberty, Richard Alan Ryerson: Adams the Lawgiver. From the introduction:
On March 19, 1776—two days after America’s Continental Army forced the British Army to evacuate Boston—John Adams, attending Congress in Philadelphia, wrote to his wife Abigail, at home in Massachusetts, in reply to her inquiry about the public reception of America’s first “best seller,” Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. That anonymous author’s “Sentiments of the Abilities of America, and of the Difficulty of a Reconciliation with Great Britain are generally approved,” he began. “But his Notions, and Plans of Continental Government are not much applauded. Indeed this Writer has a better Hand at pulling down than building.”
Adams continued that several persons “through the Continent” were saying that he had written the bold tract. “But altho I could not have written any Thing in so manly and striking a style, I flatter myself I should have made a more respectable Figure as an Architect, if I had undertaken such a Work” he wrote. “This Writer seems to have very inadequate Ideas of what is proper and necessary to be done, in order to form Constitutions for single Colonies, as well as a great Model of Union for the whole.”
Just over a month later, Adams’s short pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, also published anonymously, appeared in Philadelphia. Its succinct argument, the briefest and one of the most effective that Adams ever wrote, has sometimes been regarded as a reply to the shortcomings he saw in Paine’s understanding of constitutional government. But Adams’s intentions in writing this piece had almost nothing to do with Common Sense.
Thoughts on Government was the product of over a decade of reading, pondering, public speaking, and occasionally writing for publication, nearly always anonymously, in both the European and British republican traditions, an intellectual legacy that Adams freely acknowledged in his essay. It was also the termination of nearly a year of impassioned oral arguments, in committees and on the floor of Congress, in favor of written constitutions that could enable British North America’s rebelling colonies to govern themselves as nearly autonomous republics, and to unite in a union with sufficient strength to separate from the powerful British Empire. Yet despite Adams’s exceptional intellectual preparation for this pamphlet, he never intended to publish Thoughts on Government. The work grew out of a sequence of private letters written for his congressional colleagues, one of whom decided, without Adams’s knowledge, to send it to the printer…
And in conclusion:
One cannot say with certainty how many of America’s first state constitutions were directly shaped by the recommendations of this elegant and profound political tract. But the frames of government that soon appeared, and the direct connection of the recipients of Adams’s original letters with North Carolina and Virginia, suggest a strong influence. Five state constitutions framed between May and December 1776, in Virginia, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina, did take the general form that Adams advocated, while just one, Pennsylvania’s radical unicameral constitution (September 1776), violated nearly every political principle that John Adams held dear. Later constitutional creations and revisions in New York (1777), South Carolina (1778), New Hampshire (1784), and Georgia and Pennsylvania (both in 1790), produced governments closer to Adams’s vision.
Adams’s own Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, of course, closely followed his plan of 1776, but with important new clauses, both by Adams and by the constitutional convention that revised his original draft. And that document also influenced both the state constitutions that followed it and the federal constitution in 1787.
But beyond the immediate constitutional influence of Thoughts on Government, there is a certain irony. When John Adams told Abigail in March 1776 that if he had written Common Sense, he would have been a less effective polemicist but a better constitutional architect than Thomas Paine, he had no idea how soon he would contribute to both new state constitutions and to Independence. By May, he found himself at the center of Congress’s drive for the immediate creation of new constitutions that would totally suppress British authority in America. The vital importance of these constitutional foundations for separating from the British Empire made John Adams’s role in delivering the closing argument for Independence on July 1, on the floor of Congress, particularly appropriate.
In my view Adams’ work is unappreciated in modern originalism, in which it seems rarely cited.
Posted at 6:17 AM