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 m
iddle 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 eight
eenth-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.
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