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Subject Area: Political Theory
Topic: The American Revolution and Constitution

TO SAMUEL PERLEY. - John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 9 (Letters and State Papers 1799-1811) [1854]

Edition used:

The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes. Vol. 9.

Part of: The Works of John Adams, 10 vols.

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Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


TO SAMUEL PERLEY.

Quincy, 19 June, 1809.

I received your favor of the 12th. You propose to me an abridgment of my works. Some fifty-five years ago, I learned from Lord Coke, that abridgments were chiefly useful to the makers of them. It would be of no use to me to abridge my poor productions; besides, I had rather write as many new ones than undertake to abridge the old ones.

You say that our ungovernable newspapers have published something concerning my works, to my disadvantage. I thank you for this epithet “ungovernable.” It is so fine an expression, and at the same time so simple, natural, and exact, that I wonder it has never occurred before. A great minister of State, in the estimation of the world, the Comte de Vergennes, once said to me, “Mr. Adams, the newspapers govern the world!” Let me ask you, Mr. Perley, whether this apothegm has not been verified in our own country, sometimes to her profit, and sometimes to her loss. Let me ask you again, if the world is governed by ungovernable newspapers, whether it does not follow by necessary logical consequence that the world is ungovernable.

The newspapers have represented my writings as monarchical, as having a monarchical tendency; as aristocratical, and having an aristocratical tendency. In answer to these charges, I only ask that they may be read.

I have represented the British Constitution as the most perfect model that has as yet been discovered or invented by human genius and experience, for the government of the great nations of Europe. It is a masterpiece. It is the only system that has preserved or can preserve the shadow, the color, the semblance of liberty to the people in any of the great nations of Europe. Consider the republics, Venice, Holland, Switzerland; not a particle of liberty to the people was preserved in any of them more than there was in France, nor so much either. Our own Constitutions I have represented as the best for us in our peculiar situation, and while we preserve ourselves independent and unallied to any of the great powers of Europe. An alliance with either France or England would, in my humble opinion, put an end to our fine system of liberty.

Let me give you a few hints of the history of my “Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States.”

In 1775 and 1776 there had been great disputes, in Congress and in the several States, concerning a proper constitution for the several States to adopt for their government. A Convention in Pennsylvania had adopted a government in one representative assembly, and Dr. Franklin was the President of that Convention. The Doctor, when he went to France in 1776, carried with him the printed copy of that Constitution, and it was immediately propagated through France that this was the plan of government of Mr. Franklin. In truth, it was not Franklin, but Timothy Matlack, James Cannon, Thomas Young, and Thomas Paine, who were the authors of it. Mr. Turgot, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, Mr. Condorcet, and many others, became enamored with the Constitution of Mr. Franklin. And in my opinion, the two last owed their final and fatal catastrophe to this blind love.

In 1780, when I arrived in France, I carried a printed copy of the report of the Grand Committee of the Massachusetts Convention, which I had drawn up; and this became an object of speculation. Mr. Turgot, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, and Mr. Condorcet and others, admired Mr. Franklin’s Constitution and reprobated mine. Mr. Turgot, in a letter to Dr. Price, printed in London, censured the American Constitution as adopting three branches, in imitation of the Constitution of Great Britain. The intention was to celebrate Franklin’s Constitution and condemn mine. I understood it, and undertook to defend my Constitution, and it cost me three volumes.

In justice to myself, however, I ought to say, that it was not the miserable vanity of justifying my own work, or eclipsing the glory of Mr. Franklin’s, that induced me to write. I never thought of writing till the Assembly of Notables in France had commenced a revolution, with the Duke de la Rochefoucauld and Mr. Condorcet at their head, who I knew would establish a government in one assembly, and that I knew would involve France and all Europe in all the horrors we have seen; carnage and desolation, for fifty, perhaps for a hundred years.

At the same time, every western wind brought us news of town and county meetings in Massachusetts, adopting Mr. Turgot’s ideas, condemning my Constitution, reprobating the office of governor and the assembly of the Senate as expensive, useless, and pernicious, and not only proposing to toss them off, but rising in rebellion against them.

In this situation I was determined to wash my hands of the blood that was about to be shed in France, Europe, and America, and show to the world that neither my sentiments nor actions should have any share in countenancing or encouraging any such pernicious, destructive, and fatal schemes. In this view I wrote my defence of the American Constitutions. I had only the Massachusetts Constitution in view, and such others as agreed with it in the distribution of the legislative power into three branches, in separating the executive from the legislative power, and the judiciary power from both. These three volumes had no relation to the Constitution of the United States. That was not in existence, and I scarcely knew that such a thing was in contemplation till I received it at the moment my third volume was about to issue from the press. I had hardly time to annex it at the end.

I was personally acquainted with Mr. Turgot, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, and Mr. Condorcet. They were as amiable, as learned, and as honest men as any in France. But such was their inexperience in all that relates to free government, so superficial their reading in the science of government, and so obstinate their confidence in their own great characters for science and literature, that I should trust the most ignorant of our honest town meeting orators to make a Constitution sooner than any or all of them.

And now, Sir, give my compliments to Mr. Simon Greenleaf, your lawyer, and tell him that he is welcome to publish this letter, if he pleases, provided he publishes yours before it, not otherwise.