The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition: 1943 and All That
• Preface to the 1965 Edition
• Part One: the English Heritage and the Colonial Historical View
• Chapter I: History and the Eighteenth-century Colonist
• Chapter II: The Colonial Perspective: Ancient and Medieval
• Chapter III: The Colonial Perspective: Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians
• Part Two: the Revolutionary Use of History
• Chapter IV: The New England Historical Conscience
• Chapter V: John Adams: Political Scientist As Historian
• Chapter VI: Three Pennsylvanians: John Dickinson, James Wilson, Benjamin Franklin
• Chapter VII: The Historical Mind of the South
• Chapter VIII: Thomas Jefferson and the Rights of Expatriated Men
• Chapter IX: The Whig Historical Tradition and the Origins of the American Revolution
• Appendix I: The Saxon Myth Dies Hard
• Appendix II: History In the Colonial Library

PART TWO

The Revolutionary Use of History

CHAPTER IV

The New England Historical Conscience

The Revolutionary generation of New Englanders was deeply absorbed in its historical origins. Just as seventeenth-century New Englanders had been understandably proud of their Puritan faith and the founders of their colonies, so eighteenth-century New Englanders maintained that pride and developed a keen interest in their English origins. Puritan anxiety for the survival of their faith had created a favorable climate for public education in New England. This concern assured more than an educated clergy; it meant an educated—a historically educated—political leadership.

I

Although the clergy had declined in influence by the eighteenth century, they still occupied a position of importance and respect. They worked, lived, and argued with such political figures as John and Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy, Jr., and with such men the clergy played a vital role in formulating New England political opinion.

One of the more interesting survivals from the seventeenth-century theocracy was the Election Sermon (the first was in 1634, the last probably in 1884), given at the May meeting of the General Court. Since this coincided with the annual Boston convention of the clergy, ministers from all over New England became disseminators of new ideas. According to one scholar, the Election Sermon was second only to the colonial newspapers in successfully propagating political arguments.1 A clergyman could argue effectively for resistance to tyranny as a sacred duty; a Samuel Adams in the audience would apply the Christian lesson to his secular cause, and be strengthened.

The common denominators to the clergy and the lay politician were significant. The minister went to the same college as his political associate, read the same books, and arrived at many of the same conclusions. The sources cited by the divines in their sermons often read like a directory of “True Whig” historians. The classical authors—Tacitus, Sallust (both in the Thomas Gordon translation), Plutarch, and Caesar—were closely followed by Locke and Sidney, Coke and Somers, Burnet and Rapin. Andrew Eliot, of South Church in Boston, admitted that it was Algernon Sidney, the “Martyr to civil Liberty,” who first taught him “to form any just sentiments on government,” sentiments Eliot developed by reading John Trenchard’s History of Standing Armies and Marchamont Nedham’s familiar Excellencie of a Free State.2 Jonathan Mayhew, of Boston’s West Church, was equally attached to Sidney and not only used Gordon’s Tacitus, but also admired his Cato’s Letters.3

Mayhew was probably the most outstanding of New England’s politically minded clerics. A “transcendent genius” according to John Adams, Jonathan Mayhew was an early advocate of “the principles and feelings” for which the Revolution was undertaken.4 The problems of religion and life were one and the same to Mayhew. At Harvard he wrote in his notebooks that he was determined to discover “the Affairs, Actions and Thoughts of the Living and the Dead, in the most remote Ages and the most distant Nations.”5 He carefully studied “the Characters and Reign etc of K[ing]. C[harles]. I” for a better understanding of the origins of the Puritan migration. To this end he studied Whitelocke’s Memorials (“an exquisite scholar”) and read the Memoirs of “honest Ludlow” the regicide. He admired Milton’s account of the English Commonwealth and noted that the rebellion came because “Charles the first had sinned flagrantly and repeatedly” against “the antient form of Government” in England.6

The use to which Mayhew put such studies is best seen in his controversial Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, a sermon delivered on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649/50. Taking vigorous issue with recent Anglican efforts to portray Charles as a martyred monarch, Mayhew began his refutation with some remarks on the antiquity of English liberties. The English constitution, he asserted, “is originally and essentially free.” Roman sources, such as the reliable Tacitus, made it clear that “the ancient Britains … were extremely jealous of their liberties.” England’s monarchs originally held title to their throne “solely by grant of parliament,” which meant the ancient English kings ruled “by the voluntary consent of the people.”7

If Mayhew’s history showed him a familiar pre-Norman political utopia in England, it also proved the right of all men “to vindicate their natural and legal rights.” On this principle Tarquin was expelled from ancient Rome; on this principle the conquering and tyrannical Julius Caesar was “cut off in the senate house”; and on this principle Charles I “was beheaded before his own banqueting house,” and James II had to flee from the country “which he aim’d at enslaving.” All men had rights; but Englishmen had a record for maintaining theirs despite the tyrannical efforts of misguided kings like Charles I.8

After forty pages of such historical discourse, Mayhew reached the main point of his sermon: the essential rightness of the execution of an English king. Mayhew did not mince his words. Charles had governed in “a perfectly wild and arbitrary manner,” paying no regard to the constitutional limitations upon his royal authority. Charles was a victim of his own “natural lust for power,” and the evil influence of wicked councilors. His execution was the deserved fate of a monarch who levied taxes without the consent of his people, who set up arbitrary courts, who “reduced the Sabbath with his Book in favor of sports” and openly encouraged Roman Catholicism. Opposition to Charles could not be treason—in Mayhew’s view Charles was no longer a king after his attempt to change a free and happy government into “a wretched, absolute monarchy.” Charles had “unkinged himself” long before his trial. England did not execute a monarch, but “a lawless tyrant.” The date of January 30 should be “a standing memento that Britons will not be slaves.” And lest the political lesson be missed, Mayhew gave due notice that the death of a Stuart tyrant should be “a warning to all corrupt councellors and ministers, not to go too far in advising to arbitrary, dispotic measures.”9

Mayhew’s religious message was overshadowed by his historical discussion. Those interested in theology might discover, if they listened carefully, that Mayhew believed the biblical injunction to submit to higher powers was meant for good rulers only; bad rulers—like Charles I and his sons—were the devil’s ministers, not the Lord’s. Mayhew’s religion showed there was no obligation to obey a bad king; his history showed the positive action that could be taken against tyranny.

The vigor of Mayhew’s presentation established his political reputation. His sermon was published not only in Boston, but in London as well—in 1752 and again in 1767.10 In Boston, John Adams remembered long afterward, Mayhew’s sermon “was read by everybody.”11 This included some angry Anglicans who quoted Stuart sympathizers like Lord Clarendon, or resorted to the argument that a king should be obeyed because he is a king.12 Among others who joined the newspaper controversy over Charles I were Mayhew supporters who wrote to the Boston Evening-Post citing Burnet: Charles I “had a high Notion of Regal Power, and thought that every Opposition to it was Rebellion.” The same newspaper also published a definition of a good king: such a monarch “has imprison’d none against the law, granted no Monopolies to the Injury of Trade, collected no Ship-Money, rob’d none of their Religious Liberties … all which … were flagrant in the Tyrannical Reigns of the Steward-Family,” so well known for their “violent Attachment to Popery and Arbitrary Power.”13

Mayhew had indeed (as John Adams noted) revived Puritan “animosities against tyranny.” In his Election Sermon before Governor William Shirley in 1754, Mayhew returned to his theme that “loyalty and slavery are not synonymous.” “Monarchical government,” he declared, “has no better foundation in the oracles of God, than any other.”14 In 1765, with the provocation of the Stamp Act to consider, Mayhew delivered another moving discourse on the virtues of liberty and the iniquity of tyranny. The essence of slavery, he announced, consists in subjection to others—“whether many, few, or but one, it matters not.”15 The day after his sermon the Boston mob attacked Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson’s house, and many thought Mayhew was responsible. Mayhew did his best to disavow any association with the mob’s action; violence of this sort, he said, was a poor cloak for “zeal for liberty.”16 The tyranny of the mob was as bad as the tyranny of the British Parliament.

Mayhew’s case against England was essentially conservative. He wanted to preserve the constitutional rights belonging to all Englishmen. During the decade preceding his untimely death in 1766, Mayhew read widely on the legal rights of Englishmen in America. His happy correspondence with Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn brought a steady stream of handsome history books to his Boston home. Hollis, as Caroline Robbins has noted, “thought that England had discovered liberty and that it should be shared with other people.” A wealthy man, Hollis sponsored fine new editions of Locke, Sidney, and Milton, sending copies to Mayhew.17 Hollis also arranged for his literary friends to send Mayhew their productions. Catherine Macaulay supplied Mayhew with volumes of her History of England; Mayhew read her treatment of the Stuarts “with great pleasure.” As Mayhew exclaimed to Hollis, Mrs. Macaulay wrote “with a Spirit of Liberty, which might shame many great Men (so called) in these days of degeneracy, and tyrannysm and oppression.”18 Mayhew also returned to Cato’s Letters (which he had first read at Harvard) and was so moved at rereading Trenchard’s essay on the proper treatment of colonies that he urged Hollis to have the piece reprinted in the London press. Hollis was delighted to respond, and in October 1765 readers of the St. James’ Chronicle were duly regaled with Trenchard’s timely item from the fourth volume of Cato’s Letters.19 Londoners thus had an opportunity to agree with Mayhew that Trenchard offered “many things much to the present purpose … which look almost like prophecy.”20 Hollis not only kept Mayhew well supplied with reading matter, but also offered observations on the discouraging tone of such books. Mayhew became increasingly worried over the future of the Anglo-American connection. As he confessed to Hollis, “the account which you give me, as well as others, of the political state of Affairs in England, is extremely afflictive to me; and fills me with very gloomy apprehensions.”21

Mayhew’s matured conclusions were most cogently presented in his Thanksgiving Sermon, The Snare Broken. Since he died of a stroke shortly after, this was Mayhew’s political valedictory. But he died comforted by the news of the repeal of the Stamp Act; he had lived to see a measure of British recognition for colonial constitutional rights. What mattered to Mayhew was that England should continue to respect American liberties. The mother country must recall that her colonists were historically “freeborn, never made slaves by the right of conquest in war.” England must remember that the colonists were English and entitled by Magna Charta to fundamental constitutional privileges, confirmed in colonial charters. The Stamp Act, calling for taxation without colonial consent, had clearly violated the most basic of colonial rights, derived from Magna Charta, colonial charters, and the British constitution. It was now up to aroused Americans to prevent future violations: “History, one may presume to say, affords no example of any nation, country, or people long free, who did not take some care of themselves.” Only by being alert would Americans avoid “that ugly Hag Slavery, the deformed child of Satan.” Mayhew was happy over the end of the Stamp Act; but he feared complacency, for history supplied too many horrid examples of what could happen to a sleeping people. And yet Mayhew found room for some optimism. “Let us not be insensible of our own felicity,” he urged. The chief threat to future happiness lies with the few “evil-minded individuals in Britain” who in the past had ensnared King and Parliament. Americans were not faced with the need for change or innovation; they now knew their rights and liberties, and they knew their historical and constitutional foundation. If innovations came, they would come from England. Americans needed only to hold tight to what they knew they were entitled to.22

The Snare Broken enjoyed three editions before the end of 1766. It was a distinguished political testament, written in a language understood by contemporaries and supported by familiar authorities. Mayhew had relied heavily upon such relatively recent writers as Sidney, Milton, and Locke, saying “I liked them; they seemed rational.”23 Mayhew was not a political philosopher.24 He saw politics as a tool of religion, and he made civil and religious liberty his inseparable goals. “The purpose of the divine mission of Jesus Christ,” he said, “is the happiness of man: but that happiness can only result from Virtue, and virtue is inseparable from Civil Liberty.”25 His contributions to the American Revolution were a religious justification of the movement and a clerical endorsement of the patriot politicians. He reminded his congregation of the antiquity of the rights for which he stood, recalling the principles of the Puritans of the seventeenth century and demonstrating the derivation of New England principles in the eighteenth century. His public recollection of earlier royal tyrants was intended to awaken his people to present dangers. He never forgot the Stuarts. “Four princes,” he called them, “whose reigns were all inglorious”; they were men “of great pride and vanity, of arbitrary notions and practices, of little wisdom, policy or discretion.”26 Their Hanoverian successors now presided over “a nation where infidelity, irreligion, corruption and venality, and almost every kind of vice, seems to have been increasing all the time!”27

Mayhew was far from alone in his historical interests. James Lockwood, who gave the Election Sermon in 1759, also discussed the justifiable beheading of Charles I and the appropriate removal of James II by a nation then “jealous of their liberties.” William Patten in Plymouth County gave a sermon in 1766 on the importance of popular over private good, and illustrated his lesson by pointing to the familiar examples of Charles I and James II; Patten urged his congregation: “Let us be exhorted, to ‘stand fast in the liberty’ wherewith, both the God of nature, and the british constitution, have made us free.” In Providence, Rhode Island, David Rowland celebrated the end of the Stamp Act with a sermon on the early history of English liberty and concluded that “it is our happiness under English government to enjoy whatever we have a natural right to.”28

But perhaps the minister who best maintained the political views of Mayhew was Isaac Skillman, of Boston’s Second Baptist Church. Skillman gave an enormously popular Thanksgiving Sermon in Boston after the Gaspée incident of 1772; his Oration Upon the Beauties of Liberty, or, the Essential Rights of Americans earned five new editions within two years. Dedicating his sermon to Lord Dartmouth and calling himself “a British Bostonian,” Skillman began by carefully disassociating himself from any criticism of the King: George III, declared Skillman, surely did not mean to attempt tyranny; he must know (as Mayhew claimed Charles I must have known) that a tyrannical monarch ceases to be a king, since as a tyrant he has broken his coronation oath to govern justly. George must certainly recall the fate of Charles I, and should he “tread in the same steps, what can he expect?” Skillman professed the deepest love for his King, but, he said, “I revere the rights of an Englishman before the authority of any King upon the Earth.”29

According to Skillman the chief enemy of Englishmen was ministerial tyranny. It was up to the King and Parliament to set straight their own house. They should correct mistaken policies and recall their history. They might profit, he suggested, from Burnet’s History of His Own Time (so “noble, valuable and great”) and from restudying the record of monarchical and Parliamentary tyranny in the seventeenth century. History, claimed Skillman, “shews, that an arbitrary dispotic power in a prince, is the ruin of a nation. … Every Age and every history furnishes us with proofs, as clear as the light of the morning.” History showed Skillman that “it is no rebellion to oppose any King, ministry, or governor, that destroys … the rights of the people.” George III ruled as much by compact in America as in England. He had no hereditary right, as in Hanover; “it cannot be a parliamentary right, that lies in Britain.” It was manifestly not a right by conquest—and never would be. George III had contracted to defend colonial religious and civil rights; if he broke his contract the King became the real rebel.30

Skillman’s use of history, his sources, and his arguments are comparable to Mayhew’s. The language is stronger, the threats less disguised, but unlike Mayhew, Skillman had lived to see the Townshend Acts and the Boston Massacre. New England clergymen were keenly exercised over British tyranny because their ancestors had fled England to avoid Stuart oppressions. Their history deepened their sense of alarm. Contemporary England seemed to resemble the corrupted country of Charles II. As Andrew Eliot of Boston, successor to Mayhew in the confidence of Thomas Hollis, confessed, “I tremble for the nation which has so few honest patriots—These few I fear will not be able to Stem the torrent of Ambition Luxury and Venality.”31

The clergy trembled and they thundered. They feared tyranny, and they feared immorality and spiritual decay. They joined battle with a mother country oblivious of its political and moral obligations, and ultimately separation seemed essential to avoid the contagion of English “swearing, lying, killing, stealing, adultery.” The England of their historical admiration was apparently gone forever. “The general prevalence of vice,” concluded Samuel Langdon of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1775, “has changed the whole face of things in the British government.” Now he saw “a mere shadow of its ancient political system.”32 With singular felicity of phrase, Samuel Stillman, pastor of Boston’s First Baptist Church, summed up his private feeling of political compulsion: after the Coercive Acts of 1774, “we have,” he wrote Patience Wright, “too great a Sense of the Privileges of Englishmen, too much of the Spirit of Britons, and too great a Conviction of our own Importance, to consent to be Slaves.” As a footnote, Stillman asked his correspondent to remember him to that “celebrated female Advocate for the Rights of Mankind, Mrs. Macaulay.”33 The New England clergy’s arguments for resistance to English misrule contributed much to colonial unity on the eve of independence.

II

If Mayhew led New England clerical criticism of England, James Otis mounted the first political offensive using the law as justification. A Harvard graduate, Otis was able to study history with the resources of his college library. He developed a taste for reading and wanted to buy books for himself. In a familiar type of student letter, Otis was soon asking his father for more money: “If you Can possibly Spare Some money for to buy me Some Books if it is but ten Pounds-worth for if I live at home next Year in order to follow my Studies I had as good pretend to Run with my legs tyed as to make any Progress with what Books I have.”34 Evidently his father responded obligingly, despite his son’s lack of punctuation, for Otis encountered no difficulties in his law studies with the esteemed Jeremiah Gridley, then Attorney General of Massachusetts Bay. Otis was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1748, but began his career as a lawyer by spending more time with his books than with clients.35 He read his Coke with care and studied the works of William Hawkins, whose Abridgement of the First Part of Lord Coke’s Institutes and Pleas of the Crown were as useful as they were popular. Otis studied English common law carefully. The Writs of Assistance case gave him his opportunity to demonstrate his legal acumen.

The writs were a species of search warrant used with vigor against colonial smugglers after 1755. More effective than ordinary search warrants, the writs enabled any customs official in company with a court officer to conduct a general search in any place or habitation where smuggled goods were believed to be. These writs originated during the reign of Charles II and were extended to the American colonies by the Navigation Act of 1696. The only limitation to these broad authorizations for search was that a writ expired six months after the death of a reigning sovereign. Thus upon the death of George II in October 1760, Thomas Lechmere, Surveyor General of the Customs in America, applied to the Massachusetts Superior Court for fresh authority. The Court agreed to hear the opposition of Massachusetts merchants as presented by Oxenbridge Thacher and James Otis; the case for the Crown was made by Attorney General Gridley, Otis’ legal mentor.36

The actual legality of the writs can hardly be questioned. While, as William Blackstone conceded, a general warrant “is illegal and void for it’s certainty,”37 Parliament had always reserved the right to make exceptions, and English legal usage indicated that similar writs had long been observed.38 Consequently when Otis reviewed the question of their legality, he came in conflict with the established authority of Parliament itself, and his blunt denial of Parliament’s power captured the imagination of John Adams.

“Otis was a flame of fire,” according to this enraptured listener in the Massachusetts Court. “Every man of an immense crowded audience,” Adams continued, “appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against Writs of Assistance. Then and there, was the first scene of the first act of opposition, to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain.” Although some may dispute Adams’s conclusion that “then and there, the child Independence was born,” there is general agreement that Otis offered a persuasive and eloquent argument.39

Otis’s approach was that of a lawyer who had investigated the history of common law, which he regarded as the protection of all Englishmen, wherever located. For Otis, the British constitution was essentially a government of law, a law which was superior to both executive and legislature, a law which went back (as Coke claimed) to time immemorial. Otis searched into “the old Saxon laws,” he reviewed the affirmations of Magna Charta and “the fifty confirmations of it in Parliament,” and like Mayhew he took careful note of past occasions when the fundamental laws of England had been violated. He identified the writs with the kind of power “which in a former period of English history, cost one King of England his head, and another his throne.”

Otis now reached the heart of his case: Parliament had no constitutional authority to authorize writs which contradicted the “fundamental rights” of Englishmen. He based his argument on Coke’s opinion in Bonham’s Case (1606) as cited in Charles Viner’s General Abridgement of Law and Equity,40 but Otis was probably familiar with Coke’s original comment (in his Reports) that “it appears in our books, that in many cases, the common law will control acts of parliament, and sometimes adjudge them to be utterly void.”41

Otis saw in this a historical substantiation for his contention that the writs were indeed against English common law and therefore void. Although he had looked deeply into historical precedents, and sought to support his argument with previous examples, the weight of legal authority in the past was frequently against him. So he relied on more ancient, more fundamental principles. There could be, he declared, “NO PRESCRIPTION old enough to supersede the law of nature.” In pleading that an act of Parliament against common law was void, he argued out of the “Proeme” of Coke’s Second Institutes against the legal precedents cited by Gridley. He insisted that Americans were fully entitled to the rights guaranteed under common law and also the rights beyond it, rights which he believed controlled common law. Englishmen in America, he pleaded, could claim the same privileges “as any inhabitant of London or Bristol, or any part of England.”42 He impressed Chief Justice Hutchinson, a historian himself, but the decision of the Court was in favor of the writs. No one was greatly surprised when Parliament confirmed its belief in its own authority by reenacting the writs in the Townshend Acts of 1767.

Although defeated in this first encounter, Otis did not abandon his concern for colonial rights. Unhappily while he was sufficiently positive about what such rights should be, he was far from consistent on the proper course of colonial action to reclaim them. Otis thought of himself as a realist who had clearly in mind the political goals which should be achieved, but his realism fell short of formulating any specific course of action designed to achieve these goals. His historical and legal investigations gave him a clear enough concept of what should be ultimate colonial objectives, but his periodic flirtation with political ambition disconcerted and alienated many of his earlier admirers.

He never gave up his claim for colonial equality with Englishmen in the mother country with respect to constitutional rights, but he was sometimes prepared to suggest this equality meant an equal subjection to Parliament as a result.43 On the other hand, his initial conclusion about the supremacy of common law acted as a useful brake upon rash conceptions of Parliamentary supremacy in all things. Parliament’s authority was subordinate to common law, and since common law could not be abrogated, any Parliamentary effort to tax America must necessarily be illegal. It followed that if Parliament sought to exert an illegal authority, the colonies would be legally correct in resisting.

And yet this seems like a legalistic game that Otis was playing. He had found a convincing justification for but declined to advocate Revolutionary action despite the provocation of the Sugar and Stamp Acts.44 Clifford K. Shipton has argued that Otis made frequent admission of the power of Parliament (while simultaneously denying the equity of the use of such authority) in the hope that recognition of a de facto situation would propitiate that body and avoid oppression.45 This seems doubtful: Otis surely had little to hope for from a Parliament which he had already attacked for exceeding its constitutional role. His reading seems to have convinced him of the decay of this very body whose judgment he now appears ready to accept. Of the House of Lords, he publicly asserted in 1768 that “’tis notoriously known there are no set of people … more venal, more corrupt and debauched in their Principles.” He admitted the peers could claim to be educated, but what did they learn at Oxford and Cambridge? “Why—nothing at all but Whoring, Smoking and Drinking.” And the Commons were no better: they were “a parcel of Button-makers, Pin-makers, Horse Jockeys, Gamesters, Pensioners, Pimps and Whore Masters.”46 This, it should be remembered, was offered in the same year that Otis also announced “the power of parliament over her colonies was absolute,” and if only there were a few Americans in Westminster, then “the power of parliament would be as perfect in America as in England.”47

Otis seems to have been unable to accept the implication of his original contentions; yet he would not give them up. He signed the Stamp Act Congress Resolutions only with the greatest of reluctance, because “Parliament had a right to tax the colonies, and he was a d—d fool who denied it.”48 Still, he obviously resented Parliamentary interference in colonial affairs. Later he challenged Parliament to repeal the Townshend duties—“or else they [the English] are lost forever!” He was distressed by the continued presence in America of British troops, troops which would obviously remain as long as there was a crisis. History, he recalled, “is full of examples, that armies, stationed as guards over provinces, have seized the prey of their general, and given him a crown at the expense of his master.” England should therefore beware lest “another Caesar should arise and usurp the authority of his master.” He knew Caesar as “the destroyer of the roman glory and grandeur,” and usurpation might well be the way to British imperial disaster.49

And so Otis moved from one political posture to another. One moment he could threaten George III with the fate of Charles I; on another occasion he could recommend trust in Parliament’s wisdom; and another time he would subordinate Parliament to common law, and remind that body of its obligation to respect the historical and legal right of Britons to be “as free on one side of the atlantic as on the other.”50 His reputation suffered from his apparently erratic conduct. But by first questioning the legal authority of Parliament in his Writs of Assistance case in 1761, and, after his coffeehouse brawl with John Robinson a decade later,51 by being a living martyr to British brutality, Otis made his most direct contributions to the colonial cause. He may have been a prisoner to a reputation more radical than he sought. But Otis popularized an important historical conclusion: an appeal to “the rights and privileges confirmed and secured … by the British Constitution” could be used to deny British authority. These rights were “our best inheritance.”52

III

Samuel Adams was no lawyer, nor was he particularly learned, yet in contrast to Otis, he was a wonderfully single-minded man. There could be no question of his extreme hostility, or the consistency of his opposition, to British rule. He was willing to employ any means to gain his ends. He was an uncommonly tough-minded politician, a skillful agitator, who capitalized upon every possible opportunity.53

Lacking the broad intellectual interests of his cousin John and the legal training of James Otis, Sam Adams was nevertheless graduated from Harvard, even receiving his master’s degree. Presumably he consulted the shelves of the college library, but with no very fruitful results. Though he absorbed the natural rights philosophy of his era, his convictions and passions were determined more by his practical experience and personal prejudices than by scholarship. He sometimes used history less to demonstrate his own thinking, perhaps, than to influence that of others. His interest in his past was essentially subjective; history to Adams was mainly a manner of expressing a political argument. Since he was an exceptionally shrewd judge of political fashion, the use he made of history indicates something of the historical sensitivity of his colonial audience.

Certainly Sam Adams knew enough history to make frequent use of illustrations and similes from ancient as well as modern times. Well aware of the general disrepute of Julius Caesar, Adams pointed to Caesar’s similarity to Thomas Hutchinson and Lord Hillsborough. Caesar had been the “public Executioner of his Country’s Rights”; Hutchinson in his ambition and lust for power might prove the same for Massachusetts. Caesar “had learning, courage, and great abilities,” even as “the Tyrant of Rome.” In comparison Hutchinson and Hillsborough were poor things.54

Adams was fond of the classical comparison: the unsteady British empire reproducing the disintegration of Rome. Drafting Boston’s statement of The Rights of the Colonists in 1772, Adams complained that the British treated their colonists “with less decency and regard than the Romans shewed even to the Provinces which They had conquered.” In the Boston-Gazette of October 14, 1771, he had observed “all might be free … if all possessed the independent spirit of Brutus, who to his immortal honor, expelled the proud Tyrant of Rome.”55

The fall of empires was a mighty theme, a frightening one as Adams drew parallels between his Britain, his America, and Rome of long ago. He wrote John Scollay on the eve of Independence “ ‘The Roman Empire,’ says the Historian [William Robertson], ‘must have sunk, though the Goths had not invaded it. Why? Because the Roman Virtue was sunk.’ ”56 Other empires had fallen as well. Adams knew Vertot’s History of the Revolutions of Sweden, with its melancholy tale of the fall of that “free, martial and valiant people.” Swedes, once so great, were now debased, Adams wrote, so far lost that they “rejoice at being subject to the caprice and arbitrary power of a Tyrant.” Britons, Bostonians, and Americans might suffer a “like Catastrophe.”57

English history had been the history of freedom. Would it continue to be? Anthony Ellis’s recent Tracts on Liberty supplied Adams a historical account of the progress of English liberty. Adams learned of the freedom of “the Northern nations, from among whom the Saxons came into England,” bringing representative habits of Saxon government with them across the Channel. The foundation of the original English constitution, Adams read in Ellis, was the inability of “the Supreme Power” to “take from any Man any part of his Property without his Consent in Person or by his Representative.” This pure, this perfect right against despotic power was fully confirmed in Magna Charta, and Adams thoughtfully published (in the Boston-Gazette) Coke’s description of the Charter as “declaratory of the principal grounds of the fundamental laws and liberties of England.” Less sure of the intricacies of Dr. Bonham’s Case, Adams offered his own judgment that “whether Lord Coke has expressed it or not … an act of parliament made against Magna Charta in violation of its essential parts, is void.”58

These aspects of English history fascinated Adams. He reflected his interest in his wording of the Resolutions of the Massachusetts House of Representatives on the Stamp Act, in October 1765: “one of the main pillars of the British Constitution,” he declared, was no taxation without representation; this, “together with all other essential rights, liberties, privileges, and immunities of the people of Great Britain, have been fully confirmed to them by Magna Charta.” Everyone knew by now that Americans were “entitled to the same extent of liberty with his Majesty’s subjects in Britain.” In January 1768 it was Adams again who wrote the address of the House to the Earl of Shelburne. “From the reign of Edward the Third,” he declared, “the children of his Majesty’s natural born subjects, born passing and repassing the seas, are entitled to all the rights and privileges of his natural subjects within the realm.”59

Adams shared the whig historians’ distaste for feudalism—that Norman imposition—calling it “a state of perpetual war, anarchy, and confusion.” Adams discussed this subject in a House address to Governor Hutchinson in March 1773. He quoted an unnamed but “very celebrated writer” who termed feudalism “ ‘that most iniquitous and absurd form of government, by which human nature was so shamefully degraded.’ ” Hutchinson had argued that Americans as English subjects held their lands “mediately or immediately, of the Crown.” Adams denied this with characteristic vehemence. America, unlike Saxon England, had never been conquered, and so feudalism had not been introduced. Adams allowed that “we hold our lands agreeably to the feudal principles of the King,” but this was mere form. The original settlers “wisely took care to enter into compact with the King, that power here should also be equally divided, agreeable to the original [non-Norman, nonfeudal] fundamental principles of the English constitution.”60

There were other more recent English developments which weakened Adams’s esteem for the history of the mother country. Ellis, and later Burgh, reminded him of the enduring problems represented by the Stuarts, and he revealed his familiarity with the seventeenth-century struggle for ancient liberties—with “Mr. Hampden’s ship money cause” and the noble martyr Algernon Sidney, whose writings Adams knew well.61 Adams concluded that England had failed to recover her ancient virtue, despite the staunch fight against the Stuart dynasty—“a race of Kings bigotted to the greatest degree to the doctrines of slavery.” He agreed that much was accomplished initially in the settlement of 1688, when “the British constitution was again restor’d to its original principles, declared in the bill of rights,”62 but the gain had been temporary.

Where Parliament had once resisted Stuart tyranny now it seemed bent on behaving just as despotically as that hated dynasty.63 Pensions, placement, and standing armies were the new signs of oppression, the badges of tyranny. Adams recalled reading in Hume’s History “that if James the Second had had the benefit of the riot act and such a standing army as has been granted since his time, it would have been impracticable for the nation to have wrought its own delivery.”64 As early as 1768 Adams thought the future for Americans particularly ominous. He noted “the unnecessary increase of Crown Officers” and gloomily predicted that “the time may come, when the united body of pensioners and soldiers may ruin the liberties of America.”65 He was depressed by “ ‘the Torrent of Vice’ ” which he found another “celebrated author” describing as a major menace to empire as well as kingdom. The loss of English virtue was the fundamental fact of modern history, Adams thought. By 1776 the message was plain enough: “no State can long preserve its Liberty where Virtue is not supremely honored.”66 The martyred Sidney, noted Adams later, had observed that “there are times when People are not worth saving. Meaning when they have lost their Virtue.”67

There were times when Adams thought he had moved much too belatedly for American independence—when he feared the English contagion had spread too far, when he feared Americans themselves even after independence would follow the mother country to moral and political bankruptcy. But when he struggled to stir his colleagues to vigorous opposition to British oppression, he was hopeful that America could yet be saved. And throughout his efforts he found his best arguments in the past. He believed in the natural rights of men, in the English common law and the ancient British constitution as mere distillations of “the Laws of Nature and universal Reason.”68 As he told the Governor of Massachusetts in 1769, “no time can be better employed, than in the preservation of the rights derived from the British constitution. … No treasure can be better expended, than in securing that true old English liberty, which gives a relish to every other enjoyment.”69

IV

Josiah Quincy, Jr., was as committed to “true old English liberty” as Sam Adams and better read on its history. An untimely death denied Quincy his opportunity to participate in the military events of the Revolution, but his contributions to the literature of the Revolution were substantial. The youngest of three sons, Josiah Quincy, Jr., was born to a family with sufficient wealth to send all three to Harvard for their education. He graduated in 1763 at the age of nineteen, soon secured his master’s degree, and then entered the law office of Oxenbridge Thacher, the attorney who directed the merchants’ case in the Writs of Assistance suit in 1761.70

Quincy first attracted attention by enlisting with John Adams in the defense of the unpopular British troops tried for the “murders” committed in Boston on March 5, 1770. He employed his recent legal training to fine effect and rightfully claimed the privilege of a fair trial for the unhappy Captain Preston and his men. In the process, Quincy also demonstrated the political charms of the system of English jurisprudence which he championed: there is, he observed, “a spirit” which pervades English law, an air which “inspires a freedom of thought, speech and behavior.” He suggested that in a sense both the victims and the accused were products of the nature of the “happy constitution” which English law supported. The “very natural effects” of such a constitution were “an impatience of injuries, and a strong resentment of insult.” Justice Trowbridge, summing up, discussed the nature and meaning of homicide in the common law. Paying his respects to Coke’s definition of the law as “the general customs or immemorial usage of the English nation,” he reminded the Court that “this law is the birth right of every Englishman; the first settlers of this country brought it from England with them.”71

Josiah Quincy, Sr., was an omnivorous reader of historical literature that praised liberty, and he bequeathed to his son “Algernon Sidney’s works,—John Locke’s works,—Lord Bacon’s works,—Gordon’s Tacitus,—and Cato’s Letters” as well as the hope that “the spirit of liberty [might] rest upon him.”72 But works such as Gordon’s and Sidney’s were merely Quincy Jr.’s favorites among histories. He was reasonably familiar with Plutarch, Robertson, Bolingbroke, Francis Sullivan, Burgh, Rapin, Mrs. Macaulay, and Montagu. Such “True Whigs” were supplemented by selective reading in Blackstone, Clarendon, and Hume.

As well grounded in Greek and Roman history as in that of his mother country, Quincy found history both useful and enlightening for what it taught about man. He consulted Plutarch for examples of past tyranny, noting how “no beast is more savage than man, when possessed of power equal to his passion.” He found in Clarendon the remark that “it is the nature of man, rather to commit two errors, than to retract one.” And William Robertson, “that prince of historians,” reporting on social and political corruption, supplied the comment that a people never reform themselves, but reformation “is always forced upon them by some foreign hand.” When urging his fellow Americans to new heights of patriotism, Quincy told them to “Brutus-like, therefore, dedicate yourselves … to the service of your country.” He was confident that America had her fair share of “Bruti and Cassii—her Hampdens and Sydneys—patriots and heroes, who will form a band of brothers.”73

But his chief historical lessons concerned the dangers of standing armies—anciently a peril to Rome, recently a threat to England, currently a menace to America. The occasion for Quincy’s commentary on standing armies was the enactment of the Boston Port Act of 1774, the Quartering Act, and the appointment of General Gage as governor. He was, of course, familiar enough with the incendiary situation which large bodies of British troops could create—the Boston Massacre four years earlier had been a frightening example—and the new legislation would keep the atmosphere charged. Quincy turned to his Roman history. Dipping often into Gordon’s popular translations of Sallust and Tacitus, Quincy recalled that Roman armies had been frequently “more terrible to the Roman colonies than an ‘enemy’s army’ ”—just as Americans were discovering that British troops were more threatening than their recent French antagonists.74 Referring to “the elegant and instructive history, written by the masterly hand of Tacitus,” Quincy then discussed with appropriate Roman examples “the spirit, cruelty, and rapine of soldiers quartered in populous cities.” Standing armies were the commonest vehicles for tyranny. Roman and English history provided abundant evidence of the political consequences of such military forces—both Caesar and Cromwell had enslaved their countries with armies “stationed in the very bowels of the land.” Quincy concluded that “the history of mankind affords no instance of successful and confirmed tyranny, without the aid of military forces.” The British were well equipped for tyranny. An English member of Parliament, noted Quincy, had warned his countrymen that a standing army “is a monster, that will devour all your liberties and properties!”75

The capstone to Quincy’s argument concerned the character of the British forces. From his studies of pre-Norman England he knew his ancestors had once relied upon a people’s militia rather than mercenaries. “In ancient time, the militia of England was raised, officered, and conducted, by common consent,” observed Quincy with evident nostalgia. The Saxon militia “was the ornament of the realm in peace, and for ages continued the only and sure defence in war. Was the king himself general of an army, it was by consent of his people.” His admiration for the sensible arrangements of “our Saxon ancestors” was not limited to praise for their military system, for Quincy admired their virtually elective monarchy as well. But the Saxon militia supported John Milton’s claim that an armed people were “ ‘the truest and most proper strength of a free nation.’ ” It seemed to Quincy that England’s most serious error was in allowing Henry VII—“a character odious for rapacity and fraud”—to establish “a permanent military band in that kingdom.” The Stuarts, of course, he viewed in an even worse light, since they maintained armies “not only against law, but against the repeated resolutions of every Parliament.” Charles II kept a standing army because “he found that corruption without force could not confirm him a tyrant, and therefore [he] cherished and augmented his troops to the destruction of his people.”76

Quincy’s sorties into political pamphleteering were too brief to allow an extensive historical commentary. Yet his criticisms of past English monarchs were sharp, reflecting his familiarity with Mrs. Macaulay and James Burgh. He had no love for “that odious and execrable race of tyrants, the house of Stewart.”77 He was distressed that the English, after rising “with a divine enthusiasm” against Charles I, should then first submit to Cromwell (with another standing army) and then “with unexampled folly and madness” restore Charles II to the throne. Quincy’s disgust with this Stuart monarch was unrestrained. Where some colonists might blame the Normans for everything, Quincy preferred to condemn Charles II. The corruption afflicting contemporary England originated with Charles II; the oppression of America derived from legislation enacted by Charles II. Charles II appeared so evil that Quincy could compare him only to the Emperor Charles V, who had so fiercely punished Dutch fighters for freedom. And when he read Temple’s account of the later Spanish oppression of the Dutch, Quincy was again reminded of the tyranny of Charles II in England. Under Charles II, Quincy concluded, “Britain, then for the first time, saw corruption, like a destroying angel, walking at noonday.” Thanks to that fatal Restoration of 1660, “the science of bribery and corruption hath made amazing progress” in England.78

For Quincy the past was “the voice of experience.” He tried to listen as best he could. He let such authors as Lord Bolingbroke show him how to “search the history of the world,” and he learned how to pursue the course of such singular evils as standing armies—concluding with Mrs. Macaulay that a people’s militia was “the natural strength and only stable safeguard, of a free country.”79 He noted meaningful historical parallels: the virtuous Dutch; the courageous Hungarians, who when first called rebels, “were called so for no other reason than … that they would not be slaves.”80

Quincy’s historical endeavors received an unusual stimulus: in 1774 he met personally with many of the authors he had read in America, when he made a political pilgrimage to London on the eve of the Revolution to present colonial grievances to Lords North and Dartmouth. There he mingled pleasurably with such “true Whigs” as that “most extraordinary woman” Mrs. Macaulay, and “the celebrated Dr. Burgh.” He visited several times with the former, including an afternoon spent in “improving conversation.” He subsequently dined “in the family way” with Mrs. Macaulay’s publisher, Edward Dilly, and on another occasion supped “in company with Dr. Priestley, Dr. Franklin, Price and others.” Indeed, Quincy was so definitely welcome in this charmed circle that he was even allowed an hour’s audience with the dying James Burgh, who for the occasion “took a double dose of opium to allay the pains of the stone.” Quite possibly the highlight of Quincy’s London visit was listening to Camden and Chatham in the House of Lords. Quincy carefully took down Camden’s words: “Acts of Parliament have been resisted in all ages. Kings, Lords and Commons may become tyrants as well as others. Tyranny in one or more is the same.” But Chatham far outshone Lord Camden—“he seemed like an old Roman Senator,” thought Quincy. When Chatham expressed the “hope the Whigs of both countries [England and America] will join and make a common cause,” Quincy knew his visit was not wasted.81

But neither was Quincy’s trip successful. He had come to England—despite an advanced case of tuberculosis—to argue for the colonists’ birthrights as Englishmen, but he found his own yearning for the ancient liberties of “our Saxon ancestors” insufficiently shared in England herself. The lessons of “that sagacious politician” Tacitus were poorly studied outside America; eighteenth-century England seemed unable to recapture that “divine enthusiasm” shown against the Stuarts.82 There were too few Camdens and Chathams in Great Britain, too few Macaulays and Burghs. It was Quincy’s tragedy that he died on his voyage home in 1775, his trip undoubtedly accelerating the disease which took his life. Actually, his effort at personal diplomacy was doubly tragic in its outcome, for he left England knowing that Americans would have to fight for their claim to the legal and historical rights of Englishmen.

CHAPTER V

John Adams: Political Scientist as Historian

For men anxious to pursue a path of legality, for men seeking security for property against British depredations, for men looking for stability at home and abroad, John Adams was a logical and a persuasive leader. Educated at Harvard (class of 1755), trained in law (under James Putnam), Adams earned his reputation as a patriot and Revolutionary in a series of remarkable essays. His Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, his Novanglus papers, his Thoughts on Government, and his Defence of the Constitutions are among the most important patriot writings of his generation.1

Adams has long been regarded as a New England Thomas Jefferson, more conservative than his Virginia colleague, but possessed of the same intellectual vigor and curiosity. The comparison does little justice to either Adams or Jefferson. They were both unique. They both deserve to be judged as individuals who studied similar problems. Adams may have bought somewhat fewer books than Jefferson, but he read more. Adams was always reading, always taking notes, always referring to his recent reading in his writings. When he found time he scribbled marginal notes of varying length in over a hundred of his books.2 Adams had an acute sense of intellectual duty and lectured himself repeatedly on his educational obligations: in 1759, reproaching himself for imagined sloth, he had “Virtue” give him the following orders:

After admitting he was “too minute and lengthy,” he concluded his admonition: “aim at an exact knowledge of the nature, end, and means of government; compare the different forms of it with each other, and each of them with their effects on public and private happiness. Study Seneca, Cicero, and all other good moral writers; study Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, … and all other good civil writers.”3

Adams aimed well. He frequently grew wordy—and probably alienated potential biographers in the process—but his scholarship is undeniable. Anxious to seek the law as best he could “in its fountains” (the very words of Blackstone’s recommendation of the same goal), Adams determined to furnish himself “at any sacrifice with a proper library.” With typical modesty he described how by degrees he had procured the best private library of law in Massachusetts.4 Law led him directly to history, the study of which he soon discovered indispensable. While English history was important to him, numerous volumes on the Greek and Roman past—Thucydides, Herodotus, Tacitus, Sallust, Livy—crowded Adams’s bookshelves, leaving little room for less useful literature. Possibly the one exception Adams cared to make was in favor of Scottish and German romances which “show in a clear light the horrors of the feudal aristocracy.”5

Adams read many of the same legal and historical authorities other Americans read. The real mark of Adams’s individuality is found less in his initial selection of reading than in his frequent return to certain books and his highly personal conclusions. When he later reviewed his educational experience, Adams minimized his college years: here was the ordinary routine of classical studies, endured while exploring the more fascinating worlds of mathematics and natural philosophy. When he began his law studies, he found his reading obligations too vast to allow outside interests; the law of nations, civil law, and common law demanded all his time and energies. But he was happy to add in his seventy-fourth year that “classics, history, and philosophy have, however, never been wholly neglected to this day.”6

The entries in his diary constitute an introductory inventory of Adams’s intellectual resources: in February 1756 he “staid at home reading the Independent Whig”; in March he was transcribing Bolingbroke; in April he read Milton, whose genius “was great beyond conception, and his learning beyond bounds”; in 1759 he was reading Sidney’s Discourses and often dipped into them instead of dutifully reading law briefs; in 1760 he reproached himself for having read “Coke’s Commentary on Littleton” only once—“I must get and read over and over again.” But he seems to have found Coke as dreary as did Jefferson, and he often preferred to neglect his law books and return to Bolingbroke instead—indeed he later confessed to having read Bolingbroke’s Works five times.7 There was no need to return to Coke that often, since a few years after beginning law practice Adams was introduced to William Blackstone’s writing. Charmed by this modern review of English law, Adams bought both the Law Tracts and the Commentaries as soon as they became available.8 As a useful supplement to Blackstone—for whom Adams later recommended gratitude without adoration—he read the admirable Lord Kames, author of the illuminating Historical Law Tracts.9

Adams was always a ready critic. He reported reading Clarendon in 1758 and found him an informed but “very partial Writer.” Hume was worse. “A conceited Scotchman,” was Adams’s description. In another exchange with Jefferson, Adams explained his dislike of Hume’s “elegant Lies” which “had nearly laughed into contempt Rapin Sydney and even Lock[e].” Rapin and Sidney were among Adams’s preferred authors, along with Nathaniel Bacon, Harrington, Roger Acherley, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, Burnet, and, to a lesser degree, Mrs. Macaulay and James Burgh. Adams was no stranger to what he called the fashionable reading of colonial politicians in the 1760s and 1770s.10

By 1774 Adams, deeply involved in the colonial crisis with the ministry, concluded that his seventeenth-century heroes alone—Sidney, Harrington, Milton, Nedham, Burnet—“will convince any candid mind, that there is no good government but what is republican.”11 He also liked the eighteenth-century temper of Mrs. Macaulay, with whom he corresponded. Her History of England Adams read at one time “with much admiration.” She wrote with the proper perspective, since her plan, which, said Adams, “I have ever wished to see adopted by historians,” was “to strip off the gilding and false lustre from worthless princes and nobles, and to bestow the reward of virtue, praise, upon the generous and worthy only.”12 James Burgh sent Adams a copy of his Political Disquisitions; it arrived in 1774 as he was writing the Novanglus papers. Adams found these volumes every bit as timely as did his associates in the First Continental Congress. “I cannot but think,” he wrote Burgh, that “those Disquisitions [are] the best service that a citizen could render to his country at this great and dangerous crisis.”13

Adams studied history more from a sense of critical curiosity than from a desire for substantiation of colonial claims, although his selective reading sifted out whiggish views in support of American doctrines about the historic rights of Englishmen. Essentially pessimistic in his appraisal of man, Adams found little evidence of the human progress discovered by others. History for Adams was at least in part a record of human errors. He arrived at his own conclusions about the causes of political catastrophes in the past; and since he did not anticipate any great change in human nature, he laid plans to compensate for human weakness. The greater part of Adams’s historical investigations were devoted to studying governments which had failed, he believed, because of their unbalanced structure. Adams moved from the study of history as it reflected on colonial relations with England to the study of history as it illuminated his political philosophy. He found history, law, and philosophy relevant to an examination of colonial rights, but after independence he shifted the emphasis of his historical studies to other political problems.

I

Like most Americans, Adams was a contented subject of the new king in 1760. After reading Bolingbroke’s Patriot King, he was particularly impressed with the grand promises of George III—“to patronize religion, virtue, the British name and constitution … the subjects’ rights, liberty.” These, Adams concluded, “are sentiments worthy of a king;—a patriot king.”14 Disillusionment soon set in. The Stamp Act, enacted in 1765, seemed to Adams a clear invasion of colonial rights and an occasion for examining whether or not “protection and allegiance [are] reciprocal.” If the King would not protect his American subjects from unconstitutional Parliamentary taxation, “are we not discharged from our allegiance? Is it not an abdication of the throne?”15 To questions such as these Adams addressed himself in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.

First discussed in the privacy of Gridley’s Sodalitas Club and later published in the Boston-Gazette in 1765, Adams’s Dissertation was a notable exploration of colonial rights which anticipated many of the political arguments of James Wilson, John Dickinson, and Thomas Jefferson. Yet in the Dissertation Adams did not arrive at any strongly defined conclusion. As Charles Francis Adams noted later, it was a searching, analytical sketch, with hints for future inquiries.16 John Adams was feeling his way, following the lines of thought prompted by growing sensitivity to the political implications of his reading. If there is a fundamental and unifying theme to his essay, it must be Adams’s awareness of the importance of political education. At the very outset he referred to ignorance as a principal cause of the ruin of mankind. His mission was to combat ignorance with information. He wanted fellow colonists to know their rights, and he wanted fellow Englishmen to know that the colonists would resist encroachments upon such rights. Education was vital for Englishmen on both sides of the Stamp Act controversy.

The fundamental question of 1765, as Adams saw it, was enveloped in history. In a historical review which he later described as superficial, Adams analyzed Old World tyranny as deriving from two chief sources: canon law and feudal law. The former he identified with the “astonishing constitution of policy … framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandisement of their own order.” For illustration he pointed to Robertson’s newly published History of Charles V. Feudal law was similar, employed “for the same purposes of tyranny, cruelty, and lust.” Originally, it was “a code of laws for a vast army in a perpetual encampment,” and its corollary was the investment of the monarch with all the lands within his kingdom. All men held their lands of the king, and the common people lived in “a state of servile dependence.” While either system was evil enough, history points to a worse calamity, namely the union of the two. Liberty, virtue, and knowledge “seem to have deserted the earth” until the first glimmer of light came in the form of the Reformation. The English became enlightened and rose against “the execrable race of Stuarts” to break the yoke of feudal and religious tyranny.17

This was Adams’s description of the historical setting for the colonization of America. His colonial ancestors came not for religious reasons alone, but out of “a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy before described.” The Puritan leaders succeeded because they were educated, knowledgeable men—“some of them have left libraries that are still in being, consisting chiefly of volumes in which the wisdom of the most enlightened ages and nations is deposited.”18 Being educated men, the Puritans knew the evils of even a diluted religious tyranny as represented by a “diocesan episcopacy,” so they took care to found their colony on the solid ground of “the Bible and common sense.” They also repudiated feudalism: “They detested all the base services and servile dependencies of the feudal system. They knew that no such unworthy dependencies took place in the ancient seats of liberty.” And modern New Englanders, Adams added, should note the writings of Lord Kames (“a Scottish writer of great reputation”), who termed feudal law “a constitution so contradictory to all the principles which govern mankind” that it could be secured only “by foreign conquest or native usurpations.” Since Americans were not a conquered people, feudalism had no place in the colonies. Americans, who could claim to hold their lands allodially, had chosen instead to go through the form of holding their lands from the Crown “as their sovereign lord.” This, Adams insisted, should be a form only. It was no right of entry for feudal tyranny.”19

Adams kept returning to his theme that knowledge was the road to freedom. The colonists would maintain their freedom because of “their knowledge of human nature, derived from history and their own experience.” They had an obligation to make known their knowledge, and to express resentment of British misrule. England surely would respond when suitably informed of her errors: to say otherwise would be to represent “every member of parliament as renouncing the transactions at Runing Mede.” England surely recalled “that the prince of Orange was created King William by the people, on purpose that their rights might be eternal and inviolable.” It was true, Adams conceded, that some in England had become “luxurious, effeminate, and unreasonable.” But “let us presume,” he added, “that the spirit of liberty is as ardent as ever among the body of the nation, though a few individuals may be corrupted.”20

Americans were under a historical obligation to protest invasions of their rights and to resist any resurrection of canon and feudal tyranny. Adams concluded his essay with a dramatic series of injunctions to his readers: they must persist in their search for political wisdom; they must study history; they must examine the British constitution; they must review the examples of past British defenders of freedom; they must look again at the fortitude of their immediate forefathers, who first settled America; the colonial clergy should make “the pulpit resound with the doctrines and sentiments of religious liberty”; the colonial lawyer should (like Adams) “proclaim ‘the laws, the rights, the generous plan of power’ delivered down from remote antiquity”; quoting his favorite Bolingbroke (but not identifying his source), Adams reminded fellow lawyers to “let it be known, that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments, but original rights, conditions of original contracts”; and finally, the colleges should “join their harmony in the same delightful concert”; academic orations and essays should dwell upon “the beauty of liberty and virtue, and the deformity, turpitude, and malignity, of slavery and vice.”21 All colonial energies should be directed toward creating a universal concern with freedom: the youngest and most tender mind should receive proper political education.

Adams was seeking something more than an informed measure of colonial protest. He wanted a colonial populace suitably sensitized to and properly informed on its rights. He was thinking in terms of historical parallels: the last major occasion for resistance to tyrannical encroachments had been in the seventeenth century, which “by turning the general attention of learned men to government … produced the greatest number of consummate statesmen which has ever been seen in any age or nation.” Who would ever have heard of a Milton, a Harrington, a Sidney, or a Locke, had it not been for the political circumstances which drew these men from other activities? Perhaps, mused Adams, Americans could match their performance. At least the colonists should not be “driven blindfolded to irretrievable destruction.” The plain fact was, “there seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.” The initial step would be the introduction of the canon and feudal law, which “though greatly mutilated in England, are not yet destroyed,” and the Stamp Act was a devious effort to begin the process. Since the Stamp Act taxed such avenues to knowledge as newspapers and college diplomas, it could destroy the colonists’ opportunity to investigate their actual rights. Americans had better seek wisdom while they might and employ it against this “direct and formal design” of the misguided mother country.22

Adams’s Dissertation was not limited to the tyranny represented by the Stamp Act. He also outlined his reflections on the historical and constitutional questions raised by the measure. He sought to define the origins of the rights to which he laid claim. They were, he said, God-given, “antecedent to all earthly government,” and yet supported by the British constitution. This was not, as Randolph G. Adams once contended, “a mere confusion of intellectual and political philosophy, [that] we can profitably dispense with.”23 John Adams was turning his attention to the historic exercise and recognition of man’s natural rights. Under the British constitution as Adams came to see it “all men are born equal; and the drift of the British constitution is to preserve as much of this equality as is compatible with the people’s security.”24 And the “grand,” the “fundamental principle” of the constitution is in Magna Charta: “that no freeman should be subject to any tax to which he has not given his own consent.”25 The Stamp Act was a historic departure from the constitution to which Adams gave allegiance. He and other American colonists had no representation in Parliament. The Stamp Act was invalid, “it not being in any sense our act, having never consented to it.”26

II

Pursuing the lines of inquiry thus begun, Adams noted the contrast between the England of King John and that of King George III. “The ancient barons who answered with one voice, ‘We will not that the laws of England be changed, which of old have been used and approved,’ ” now “seem to have answered that they are willing those laws should be changed with regard to America in the most tender point and fundamental principle.”27 He looked at the history of England to discover “how many arbitrary reigns do we find since the conquest.” Even Queen Elizabeth had tried to infringe Parliamentary privilege, only to be rebuffed by a sensitive Commons. The Stuarts, to their shame, failed to digest the lessons of Tudor history and created the need and opportunity for men like Algernon Sidney, “an enlightened friend of mankind, and a martyr to liberty.”28 Sidney fascinated Adams. He represented so many of the qualities Adams would have liked to become known for himself. At the Boston “massacre” trial, where he served as defense attorney for Captain Thomas Preston and the eight British soldiers of the 29th Regiment, Adams proudly cited Sidney’s respect for law as “written reason.”29 He shared the general whig distaste for mercenary troops, and portrayed the Boston “massacre” as “the strongest proof of the danger of standing armies.”30

In his exchange with William Brattle, published in the Boston-Gazette in 1773, Adams began an examination of ancient history. He acknowledged his indebtedness to Coke and Blackstone in a review of the history of the British common law he admired so much. The codification of Edward the Confessor he described as “no more than a fresh promulgation of Alfred’s code.” Common law “is of higher antiquity than memory or history can reach.” The rights supported by Alfred “have been used time out of mind.” Even the Norman conquest could not crush the rights incorporated in the English common law—“William the Conqueror confirms and proclaims these to be the laws of England … and took an oath to keep them inviolable himself”—and Magna Charta “was founded on them.”31

Unlike many of the historians he studied, Adams did not insist on the antiquity of Parliament in the course of his admiration for the antiquity of common law. Parliament was presently oppressing Americans, and Americans should know that its pretension to authority was relatively recent. He praised his Saxon ancestors as “one of those enterprising northern nations,” but charged that they “carried with them … the customs, maxims, and manners of the feudal system” to England, where they “shook off some part of the feudal fetters, yet they never disengaged themselves from the whole.” There had indeed been a “wittenagemote, or assembly of wise men,” but the Saxon monarchs only condescended to take its advice “in some few instances.” Such “particular examples of royal condescension could form no established rule.” The fact was, Adams concluded, the king in Saxon times “was absolute enough” to control the judiciary, and unhappily the King in the 1770s was trying to repeat the accomplishment in America.32

Adams had read critically enough to doubt the real meaning of pre-Norman English history. He found evidence to refute Brattle’s claim that in Saxon times royal judges received appointments and estates for life, but he had to admit he would not “lay any great stress on the opinions of historians and compilers of antiquities, because it must be confessed that the Saxon constitution is involved in much obscurity.” Adams noted how Saxon history had become a political football: “the monarchical and democratic factions in England, by their opposite endeavors to make the Saxon constitutions swear for their respective systems, have much increased the difficulty of determining … what that constitution, in many important particulars, was.”33 He was therefore much happier to turn to Rapin, Mrs. Macaulay, and Burgh on recent English history than on the Saxon period, and so in his final reappraisal of the colonial case, Adams dwelt on a past in which he had more confidence.

The first occasion was an exchange of addresses between Governor Hutchinson and the Massachusetts General Court in 1773. The immediate controversy was over the British decision that crown officials would henceforth receive their salaries from the royal exchequer. Bostonians denounced this as a further step toward complete slavery. Hutchinson in turn attempted to reconcile his fellow colonists with the British concept of the empire and its constitution: it was, he told the Assembly, “the sense of the Kingdom” that when Massachusetts was settled it was “to remain subject to the supreme authority of Parliament.” John Adams, charged with drafting the response of the House of Representatives, carefully eschewed the “popular talk” about “democratical principles”; arguments based “on nature and eternal and unchangeable truth” ought to be “well understood and cautiously applied.”34 Instead he concentrated upon “legal and constitutional reasonings,” and submitted a documented treatment of American colonization. The colonies, he contended, were never annexed to the English realm; their charters specified an allegiance to the English Crown. The colonies were part of the empire, but not an appendage of the kingdom; Parliament therefore had no legal right to legislate for Massachusetts. The charter was a grant of the King and vested the authority in the legislature to make laws which should be conformable to the principles of the English constitution and the statutes existing when the charter was granted. Adams noted that “no acts of any colony legislature are ever brought into Parliament”—they are laid before the King for his approval. History showed that Charles I had denied Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies, because “the colonies were without the realm and jurisdiction of Parliament.” And before that James I had insisted “America was not annexed to the realm and it is not fitting that Parliament should make laws for these countries.” Adams was convinced that “no country by the common law was subject to the laws of Parliament, but the realm of England.”35

The second opportunity for Adams’s historical review of the place of the colonies in the imperial structure came with the patriotic need for a response to Daniel Leonard’s “Massachusettensis” letters, a plea for submission to Parliamentary authority. John Adams began his reply—the famous Novanglus papers—in the January 23, 1775, issue of the Boston-Gazette. What followed was more than a “History of the Dispute with America, from its Origin in 1754 to the Present Time, 1774.” It was a careful study of the constitutional history of the British empire and the dominions which comprised that empire. Adams pointed to the relationship between Edward I and Henry VIII: in the thirteenth century Wales had been annexed to the dominions of the English Crown by a royal decree, not an act of Parliament; Wales was unrepresented in Parliament and was not subject to that body until new legislation was enacted under Henry VIII in 1536. Scotland supplied a similar example: for a century after the accession of James I the English Parliament lacked authority in Scotland, until the enactment of the Act of Union in 1707. So too with Ireland: although conquered by Henry II, Ireland was not subject to Parliament until the enactment of Poynings’ Law under Henry VII. No such legislation had ever been enacted for America. And if Wales, a conquered country, could know independence from Parliament, so too should an unconquered America. Each of the American colonies was a separate realm of which the King was sovereign.36

In establishing from a study of history the colonies’ independence of Parliament, Adams did not leave the door open for royal despotism. Delving into Coke’s Institutes, Adams demonstrated that while the King might “rule the divers nations and kingdoms of his empire” in his political capacity, he had “to govern them by their distinct laws.” Specifically, the King was subject to the British constitution. “There is no fundamental or other law that makes a king of England absolute anywhere, except in conquered countries.”37 A king who abuses his sovereignty forfeits his title.

Perhaps Adams’s most effective point was scored against the contention of “Massachusettensis” that resistance was futile. The colonists, claimed Adams, could not possibly lose in their contest: “If they die, they cannot be said to lose, since death is preferable to slavery.” And as they resist they can take heart from history; if Charles I had not been challenged by the Puritans, he “would undoubtedly have established the Romish religion, and a despotism as wild as any in the world.” Cromwell’s usurpation of power may have been unfortunate, but even so his government was infinitely more glorious and happy than that of his Stuart predecessor. Every effort against tyranny had had beneficial results. “Did not the English gain by resistance to John, when Magna Charta was obtained?” Did not the Dutch in their revolt against the Spanish? The Swiss against the Austrians? The Romans against Tarquin? The English against James II? Indeed, Adams added proudly, Americans took part in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when they rose against the regime of Sir Edmund Andros. And just as the English had contracted with William and Mary to rule in place of James II, so did Americans make a compact acknowledging the new sovereigns. “The oaths of allegiance are established by a law of the Province,” further demonstrating that “our allegiance to his majesty is not due by virtue of any act of a British parliament, but by our own charter and province laws.”38

Adams buttressed his claim to English rights by referring to the well-known Pleas of the Crown of William Hawkins. According to the Novanglus papers a monarch could forbid his subjects from emigrating; but once permission was given, a colonist carried his rights with him. “Our ancestors were entitled to the common law of England when they emigrated, that is, to just so much of it as they pleased to adopt.” In reality, “our ancestors, had a clear right to have erected in this wilderness a British constitution … or any other form of government they saw fit.”39 Both King and Parliament seemed not only to forget their obligations, but to overlook the basic nature of the government of which they were parts. Adams argued that he was not attacking the British empire because there was no such thing. Citing Aristotle, Livy, and Harrington, he declared “the British constitution is much more like a republic than an empire.” A republic was “a government of laws, and not of men.” According to this definition, “the British constitution is nothing more or less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate.” But an empire on the other hand “is a despotism … a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy.”40 Rome in her republican (pre-Emperor) stage illustrated Adams’s argument. Roman colonies were allowed “the privilege of cities,” which gave them Roman rights without Roman subjection. In this respect Adams thought “that sagacious city” of Rome revealed an awareness of difficulties “similar to those under which Great Britain is now laboring. She seems to have been sensible of the impossibility of keeping colonies planted at great distances, under … absolute control.”41

The explanation of England’s historical and political blindness lay with the contemporary condition of the mother country. In his Novanglus essays Adams agreed that Americans presently enjoyed “the British constitution in greater purity and perfection than they do in England,” and inquired: “Whose fault is this? Not ours.” Fresh from reading the second volume of Burgh’s Political Disquisitions, a book which he proclaimed “ought to be in the hands of every American who has learned to read,” Adams declared that modern England “is loaded with debts and taxes, by the folly and iniquity of its ministers.” Her virtue was gone. “When luxury, effeminacy, and venality are arrived at such a shocking pitch in England; when both electors and elected are become one mass of corruption; when the nation is oppressed to death with debts and taxes, owing to their own extravagance and want of wisdom, what would be your condition under such an absolute subjection to parliament?” Corruption was now so deeply implanted in England “as to be incurable, and a necessary instrument of government.” England needed revenue from America, not because of legitimate expenses incurred in the late war with France, but because of waste and political depravity: “Corruption, like a cancer … eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallowing up the whole society.”42

These, then, were “the most melancholy truths” of contemporary England. The English people were depraved, the Parliament and government venal and corrupt. Even if Americans were given direct representation in this sort of Parliament, “a deep, treacherous, plausible, corrupt minister would be able to seduce our members to betray us as fast as we could send them.” The British in their iniquity aimed for the total destruction of colonial charters, and English liberties. The British constitution—in England—had arrived “nearly to that point where the Roman republic was where Jugurtha left it, and pronounced it ‘a venal city, ripe for destruction.’ ”43

From reading Harrington, Adams recalled an observation on colonies weaning themselves “when they come of age.” Adams felt obliged to conclude his Novanglus analysis with an observation that “the colonies are now nearer manhood than ever Harrington foresaw.”44 In fact, maturity was now being thrust upon Americans by their declining mother country.

III

Between 1761 and 1776 Adams traveled a long and difficult road. He had begun with the questions: “Where are the rights of Englishmen! Where is the spirit that once exalted the souls of Britons?”45 He had examined the history of “English liberties” and concluded that they were “but certain rights of nature, reserved to the citizen by the English constitution, which rights cleaved to our ancestors when they crossed the Atlantic.” He had become familiar with the major English writers on contemporary England, and while he could still in 1774 express to Burgh the hope “that in spite of bribery, some alteration in the House of Commons for the better might be made,” his reading of Burgh confirmed his belief “that every trick and artifice of sharpers, gamblers, and horse-jockies, is to be played off against the cause of liberty in England and America.” In reality “no hopes are to be left for either but in the sword.”46 England was tottering on the edge of a precipice, and Adams had no desire to join her in any game of eighteenth-century brinkmanship. As Adams told John Avery less than a year after the Declaration of Independence, there was indeed “abundant evidence of a fixed design to subjugate America.” Any reasonable acquaintance with England’s recent history demonstrated “how completely their government was corrupted.”47 Separation had been, and was, essential.

But independence was not enough. The American colonies could learn from history not only in substantiating their claims against England but also in ensuring their political survival. Adams saw that independence demanded skilled political craftmanship in erecting a new polity. He knew what he wanted to avoid, and he offered a historical exposition of how best to prevent the sins of the English fathers being visited upon American descendants. Radical in his language against England, he was yet conservative in his domestic political expression. “I dread the Spirit of Innovation,” wrote Adams anxiously a few weeks before independence.48

In a lengthy letter in 1776 to George Wythe on the importance of constitution making, subsequently published as Thoughts on Government, he called for a popularly elected assembly, a council chosen by the legislature, and a governor elected by both bodies; judges were to be named by the governor, and there would be provision for a people’s militia, public education, and even sumptuary laws to foster frugality. He was vigorously opposed to a unicameral legislature—Turgot’s admiration for one stimulated Adams to pen his extraordinary Defence of the Constitutions a decade later—because it made for an unbalanced government. As a convenient and familiar example he cited the Long Parliament of Cromwell’s time. It was too easy for an all-powerful assembly to either emerge as an oligarchy itself, or abdicate its power to a single tyrant like Cromwell.49 Another safeguard against England’s current condition would be rotation of all offices and frequent elections. Obadiah Hulme’s Historical Essay had identified annual elections as the keystone of Saxon government, and upon its title page ran the slogan: “Where annual Election ends, there Slavery begins.”50 John Adams in his Thoughts on Government declared that there was not “in the whole circle of the sciences a maxim more infallible than this, ‘where annual elections end, there slavery begins.’ ” Adams confirmed his attachment to this principle not only in his letter to John Penn of North Carolina in 1776, but also in his 1779 Report of a Constitution for Massachusetts, where he called for annual elections of senators, representatives, and the governor.

Whether or not Adams quoted Hulme accurately by accident or had been rereading the first volume of Burgh’s Disquisitions (where Hulme’s maxim was slightly misquoted), he was obviously still familiar with his Saxon history.51 Well aware of the corruptibility of man, he thought annual elections might discourage it. Sumptuary laws might at least impede the growth of luxury and corruption. Public education would assure dissemination of knowledge, and knowledge, Adams reminded Joseph Hawley in August 1776, “is among the most essential foundations of liberty.” Within a year Adams was discussing this theme with his ten-year-old son. Urging a careful study of history on young John Quincy, he suggested a comparison of the American Revolution with others that resembled it: “The whole period of English history, from the accession of James the First to the accession of William the Third will deserve your most critical attention.” In addition to England, Adams recommended attention to “the history of the Flemish Confederacy,” along with the independence of the Swiss from Austria. He also singled out Sir William Temple’s treatment of the United Provinces and the Abbé Vertot’s accounts of the revolutions in Portugal, Sweden, and Rome. Clearly, he intended that his young son should acquire some insight into his father’s idea of “the most essential foundations of liberty.”52

As Adams contemplated the problem of maintaining American political integrity, of applying the principles of politics to the reconstruction of popular authority during and after the War for Independence, he turned again to his knowledge of English history and political science, modifying in some respects his high regard for English whig writing but not his opinion that “nine tenths of the [American] people were high whigs.”53 It was one thing to agree to name the first American warship Alfred “in honor of the founder of the greatest navy that ever existed,”54 but it was another to argue—as he believed Burgh and Mrs. Macaulay had—that an omnipotent popular assembly would be a political cure-all. Annual elections might reduce the human proclivity for corruption, but a revival of the so-called Saxon system would, in Adams’s view, be unwise. In his continued contacts with the English reformers, Adams expressed his honest doubt about this construction of an ideal constitution. To Richard Price he explained why in 1787 he undertook his Defence of the Constitutions: his fellow Americans were “running wild, and into danger, from a too ardent and inconsiderate pursuit of erroneous opinions of government.” These dangerous ideas “had been propagated among them by some of their ill informed favorites, and by various writings which were very popular among them … particularly Mrs. Macaulay’s History, Mr. Burgh’s Political Disquisitions, Mr. Turgot’s letters.” All were “excellent in some respects,” but all were “extremely mistaken in the true construction of a free government.”55 The common mistake was the same one which endangered eighteenth-century England—an unbalanced government. An unrestrained popular assembly would be as dangerous as an unrestrained despot, and any unicameral legislature, virtual or otherwise, contained this basic weakness.

Adams’s most sustained analysis of balanced government—The Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America—comprised a three-hundred-duodecimo-page study of the lessons of “the history of Europe, and of England in particular,” in which Adams demonstrated his continuing familiarity with the past and his awareness of its value as an instrument of statecraft.56 The Defence, Adams’s major work, is a compendium of readings; three-quarters of volume one, nine-tenths of volume two, and the first half of volume three were made up of excerpts from other authors. Here we see Adams as a connoisseur of history as an art and as a science, deeply interested in how history was written and keenly aware of its limitations. And yet, as he frantically copied away from books on republican governments, he seems to have really believed that by piling up such examples of recorded experiences he was showing his countrymen how to frame a foolproof constitution. The constitution-makers, meeting at Philadelphia a few months later in 1787, employed a similar technique, reviewing past constitutions for their flaws and weaknesses in an effort to discern the most stable composition for American national needs.57

Antedating the new Federal Constitution by a few months, Adams’s review took the form of a retort to M. Turgot’s praise of unicameral legislatures; it was a legal and historical brief for his political contentions. He combed over the whole range of history to deny the effectiveness of investing a single assembly with all the func