Even though the pamphlet had originated, as the subtitle put it, as a hastily composed Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend, and was later considered by Adams to be “a poor Scrap,” he actually had been thinking about creating new forms of government for the colonies ever since the possibility of independence had entered his head.23 In working out his plan of government he realized that he needed to take the various colonial constitutions, which, with their assemblies, councils, and governors, were miniature versions of the mixed and balanced English constitution that he admired so much, and transform them into constitutions applicable to what he assumed the American colonies would soon become—independent republics.
Adams was sure the new American governments had to be republics. But for Adams this was not as much of an innovation as it was for others. In his Novanglus essays of 1775, borrowing from the seventeenth-century English theorist James Harrington, he had defined a republic as “a government of laws, and not of men.” This definition, if just, he said, meant that “the British constitution is nothing more nor less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate.” This was one kind of republic the English had, but there could be other kinds. Because “the powers of society”—meaning the one, the few, and the many—could be combined in different ways, there was, he concluded, “an inexhaustible variety” of republics, including that of the British monarchy. Although he tried to explain that the British king “being hereditary, and being possessed of such ample and splendid prerogatives, is no objection to the government’s being a republic as long as it is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making,” he was never able to convince his fellow Americans that the British monarchy was really a republic; and the resultant confusion plagued him the rest of his life.24
• • •
HOWEVER MUCH HE DIFFERED with his fellow Americans over the definition of a republic, he at least agreed with them, and with Montesquieu, that as republics the new states would have to be founded on the principle of virtue. By classical standards virtue meant the willingness of people to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the public, the res publica. For this reason Adams very much wanted his home state of Massachusetts to call its “Government a Commonwealth.”25
Adams’s republicanism was liberal and enlightened, not narrowly classical. Certainly neither Adams nor Jefferson was so enamored of antiquity that either believed that an individual belonged solely to the political community and that human flourishing could be achieved only within that political community. Their republicanism was not incompatible with the need to protect individual rights from an overweening government. Yet both Adams and Jefferson were classically educated enough to know that republics required sufficient virtue in the character of their citizens to prevent corruption and eventual decay. For this reason, they both knew that republics were very fragile polities, and always had been throughout history. A republic, said Adams, “is productive of every Thing, which is great and excellent among Men. But its Principles are as easily destroyed as human Nature is corrupted.” Jefferson agreed. Americans, he said, had to anticipate “a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origins, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people.”26
Although Jefferson tended to see the corruption coming from the government while Adams believed it more likely inherent in human nature, both patriots knew that republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects. In monarchies, where authority flowed from the top down, each man’s desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by patronage or honor, by fear or force. In republics, however, where authority came from below, from the people themselves, each citizen must somehow be persuaded to sacrifice his personal desires for the sake of the public good. In their purest form republics had no adhesives, no bonds holding their societies together, except their citizens’ voluntary patriotism and willingness to obey public authority. Without virtue and self-sacrifice, republics would fall apart.
Did Americans have this “positive Passion for the public Good,” this kind of virtue? That was the question that Adams anxiously asked himself as he outlined his plan of government. As he told Mercy Otis Warren in April 1776, he had seen “such Selfishness and Littleness even in New England, that I sometimes tremble to think that altho We are engaged in the best Cause that ever employed the Human Heart, yet the Prospect of success is doubtfull not for Want of Power or of Wisdom, but of Virtue.” He knew that the new American governments would have to be popular, but he realized that “the degrees of Popularity in a Government are so various” that much might be done to prevent their corruption.27
To counter the possibility that the American people might not have sufficient virtue to sustain their new republics, Adams suggested a number of protective measures. In his pamphlet he urged a rotation of all offices, the creation of an independent judiciary that would be distinctly separated from the legislative and executive powers, laws for the liberal education of youth, and the passage of sumptuary laws. Advocating these sumptuary laws regulating personal expenditures on food and dress, he admitted, “will excite a smile.” But, he contended, they would be good for the happiness of the people and the war effort. “Frugality is a great revenue, besides curing us of vanities, levities, and fopperies which are real antidotes to all the great, manly and warlike virtues.”28
• • •
BUT MOST IMPORTANT IN COUNTERING the self-interestedness of human nature was his recommendation that the new constitutions possess some of the mixed and balanced features of the English constitution, which he claimed was “a fine, a nice, a delicate machine, and the perfection of it depends upon such complicated movements, that it is as easily disordered as the human body.”29 For Americans, however, he knew that this delicate machine would have to be republicanized. To prevent the people from having complete control of the government and running amok, all three “powers of society” had to be embodied in the constitution. This meant that the people would be represented in only one part of the legislature, in what most Americans called their houses of representatives. It was this “Popular Power, the democraticall Branch of our Constitution,” he said, that had been invaded by the British government. This popular assembly, said Adams, “should be a miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.”30
But once the people were represented in this one assembly, the “question arises whether all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, shall be left in this body?” Adams answered this question with as much passion as he felt about anything. “I think a people can not be long free, nor ever happy, whose government is in one Assembly.” For this reason he never ceased expressing horror at what Pennsylvania did in 1776 in creating a constitution with a unicameral legislature and a plural executive. In fact, in subsequent years his well-known celebration of a two-house legislature became a major weapon wielded by those seeking to revamp the radical Pennsylvania constitution.31 Adams confessed that “it would grieve me to the very Soul” if his own state of Massachusetts ever contemplated establishing “a single Assembly as a Legislature.” For the rest of his life, this devotion to a bicameral legislature embodying two principal “powers of society” became the basis of all his political theory.32
To avoid all the evils that flowed from placing all the people’s power in a single assembly, Adams urged that another distinct legislative body be created, which he labeled “a Council.” This council or upper house would not be another representation of the people. Instead, it would be an embodiment of the social power of the few, the aristocracy, in accord with the traditional theory of mixed government. In this respect his upper house was no different from Jefferson’s proposed senate.
With his proposal for a council, Adams was obviously thinking of his own Massachusetts coloni
al constitution, in which the Council (the upper house) had often tried to arbitrate the struggles between the royal governors and the people. “If the legislative power is wholly in one Assembly, and the executive in another, or in a single person,” wrote Adams, “these two powers will oppose and enervate upon each other, until the contest shall end in war.” To avoid this danger, another house in the legislature was necessary. The councils—or senates, as most states labeled the upper houses—would act, as the House of Lords in the English constitution did, “as a mediator between the two extreme branches of the legislature, that which represent the people and that which is vested with the executive.”33 This was how Montesquieu had described the role of the House of Lords in the English constitution. In other words, Adams conceived of his republicanized aristocracy mediating the classic struggle between monarchy and democracy that he and other Whigs assumed had gone on throughout the entire trajectory of English history.
If these aristocratic councils were to play their balancing role between the governors and people in the new mixed state constitutions, however, they would have to be a good deal stronger and more independent than the colonial councils had been. Even though the Massachusetts Council had been elected by both houses of the legislature, rather than appointed by the Crown, as was the case with the upper houses of the other colonies, it seldom had been able to resist the influence of the governor. “In disputes between the governor and the house,” Adams wrote in 1775, “the council have generally adhered to the former, and in many cases have complied with his humour” rather than exercise its independent judgment.34
Adams proposed that both houses of the legislature, together, would annually elect the governor, who, like the king in England, would be “an integral part of the legislature,” thus becoming an equal participant in lawmaking with the house of representatives and the senate. Although this governor would be “stripped of most of those badges of domination called prerogatives,” he, like the English king, said Adams, ought to retain a veto power over all legislation. This was a far more powerful governor than Jefferson’s proposed executive.
Although Adams’s plan of a bicameral legislature and a separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers very much influenced the state constitution-makers in 1776, his suggestion of a gubernatorial veto was too much for most of them. Except for the early constitution of South Carolina, and that only temporarily, all the revolutionary state constitutions prohibited their governors from having any role in legislation.
Even Adams’s proposal that governors be granted a veto power over legislation was made timidly and without much assurance that it would be followed. As he told his colleagues in Massachusetts, he did not “expect, nor indeed desire that it should be attempted to give the Governor a Negative, in our Colony.” Let the chief executive, he said, be only the head of the Council Board, a small executive advisory cabinet that, unlike the colonial Council, would have no legislative authority. “Our People will never Submit to more,” and, as he conceded, it was “not clear that it is best they should.”35
It was not just the elimination of the role of the governors in legislation that made the state constitutions of 1776 truly radical. Taking away all of the governors’ traditional prerogative powers, as both Jefferson and Adams suggested, the framers of the state constitutions severely undermined, if they didn’t entirely destroy, the chief magistrate’s major responsibility for ruling the society—an abrupt departure from the English constitutional tradition. The eighteenth-century English monarch may have been severely confined by the Bill of Rights of 1689 and other parliamentary restrictions, but few Englishmen ever doubted that the principal responsibility for governing the realm still belonged to the Crown. With the 1776 state constitutions, this was no longer true. When the governors had even the pardoning power wrested from their hands and granted to the popular legislatures, then it became obvious that such an enfeebled executive could no longer be a magisterial ruler in any traditional sense, but could only be an “Administrator,” as Jefferson had aptly named the office.
• • •
ADAMS WAS SURPRISED BY the rapid acceptance of the ideas expressed in his pamphlet. The adoption of republican governments, especially in the South, was “astonishing.” Prior to 1774, who could have predicted it? “Idolatry to Monarchs and servility to Aristocratical Pride,” he declared, “was never so totally eradicated, from so many Minds in so short a Time.”36
Nevertheless, it was not long before Jefferson and Adams and many other constitution-makers of 1776 came to regret what they had done. When he became governor of Virginia in 1779, Jefferson came to appreciate only too clearly the weakness of the office his colleagues had created. As he looked back from 1816, he realized that he and his fellow Americans in 1776 had not truly understood republicanism. “In truth,” he said, “the abuses of monarchy had so much filled all the space of political contemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy.” Out of our dislike of kings and former royal governors we had emasculated our new elected republican governors. “We had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that ‘governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people and execute it.’”37
Adams in 1816 would have agreed that the constitutional framers in 1776 had not fully understood what he had repeatedly called “the divine science of politicks.” But it was not because they had failed to embody the will of the people in all parts of their governments. Rather, it was because they had granted too much power to the people in the houses of representatives. They should have offset that popular power with stronger and more distinctive senates and more powerful governors, who should never have had their prerogatives taken away from them in the first place. Above all, Adams believed, these senates and governors should never have been considered to embody the will of the people. They were the aristocracy and monarchy of a proper mixed constitution; the people, the democracy, existed only in the houses of representatives.38
• • •
MUCH OF THIS TALK OF NEW GOVERNMENTS and the planning for new constitutions had taken place as a result of the Congress’s May 1776 resolutions and thus before the colonies actually declared their independence from Great Britain. So Adams had a point when he later argued that his May resolutions were more important than the Declaration of Independence, which in his mind became only a belated legal recognition of what already was taking place. Few Americans agreed with him, and certainly not Jefferson. But in May 1776 Jefferson was fortunate that Virginia ignored his wishes and refused to recall him. If he had gone home, he would have missed the most important moment of his life.
On June 11, 1776, the Congress appointed a committee of five delegates to draft a formal declaration of independence. The Congress aimed for geographical diversity: Jefferson from Virginia, Adams from Massachusetts, Roger Sherman from Connecticut, Robert R. Livingston from New York, and Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. Adams in his autobiography claimed that this “Committee of Five” had appointed Jefferson and him as a subcommittee to draft the declaration. But Adams said that he had urged Jefferson to do the drafting by himself. He told Jefferson that it was important to have a Virginian take the lead. Adams said that he had been so obnoxiously zealous in promoting independence that a document he drafted would be more severely scrutinized and criticized by the Congress than one composed by Jefferson. Besides, he knew very well the “Elegance” of Jefferson’s pen.39
Adams repeated this account in a letter to Timothy Pickering in 1822, some of which Pickering quoted in a Fourth of July oration in 1823 that was subsequently published. When this oration came to Jefferson’s attention, he wrote his friend James Madison that Adams’s memory was faulty—not surprising, he said, since Adams was nearly eighty-seven years of age and the events had taken place nearly a half century earlier.40 Jefferson, who was himself eighty, claimed that he had some notes taken at the time that showed that the committee had a
ppointed him alone to draft the Declaration. Although the notes have disappeared, if they ever existed, Jefferson was correct that he alone was appointed to draw up the document, something that Adams had previously noted in a diary entry of June 23, 1779.41
Of course, no one in 1776 realized how significant the drafting of the Declaration would become. Besides the May resolutions, which had called on the colonists to suppress Crown authority and set up independent governments, Adams thought the really important decision for independence had been taken on July 2, when the Congress voted to break away from the British empire. “The Second Day of July,” he told Abigail, “will be the most memorable Epocha in the History of America.” He believed that it “would be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great Anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by Solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”42
Adams was so busy at this time that he was probably relieved that Jefferson was assigned the task of drafting the Declaration. At the same time as he was asked to serve on the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence, he was appointed to two powerful committees: one designed to form a Board of War that would oversee military operations, and a second assigned to prepare a plan of treaties that the country would make with foreign powers—assignments that surely Adams believed were more crucial than drawing up a declaration of independence.43 By the early nineteenth century, however, both he and Jefferson knew better. The so-called authorship of the Declaration had taken on immense emotional significance for both men; indeed, it had become one of the most important issues dividing them.
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