Jefferson believed the opposite. He had not lost faith in the people themselves. He assumed the assemblies, although elected, were not really the people; these elected legislatures had drifted away from the people and were not carrying out the people’s true wishes. He was especially critical of some of his colleagues in the Virginia legislature who twice had panicked and called for a dictator to save them. Did they believe, he said, that the people of Virginia had substituted fear for virtue as their motivating principle? He knew that republicanism was risky and required an educated populace. Every government, including Virginia’s, contained “some germ of corruption,” and “when trusted to the rulers of the people alone” it was bound to degenerate. “The people themselves therefore are its only depositories.”33
In Virginia the suffrage was too limited; “the majority of the men in the state who pay and fight for its support are unrepresented in the legislature.” And “among those who share the representation, the shares are very unequal.”34 Counties in the western parts of the state did not have representation in proportion to their population. Unlike most reformers in the 1780s, Jefferson believed that a fuller and more equitable representation of the people could alleviate the problem of legislative abuses. He was one of those who paid little or no attention to what Madison later called that “essential distinction, too little heeded,” between governments that became oppressive by opposing the will of the people and those governments that became oppressive by only too accurately embodying the will of the people.35 For Jefferson the people themselves could never become oppressive; only their elected agents were capable of tyranny.
Jefferson was unable to persuade his Virginia colleagues to reform the state’s 1776 constitution. Although equally unsuccessful, reformers in the other states, especially in Pennsylvania, did not cease trying to bring their constitutions more in line with the more conservative Massachusetts constitution of 1780. Only with the adoption of the new federal Constitution in 1787 were some states, but not Virginia, able to reform their constitutions.
• • •
THE FRENCH WERE FASCINATED by all these American state constitutions. Soon after Benjamin Franklin arrived in France in 1776, he arranged with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt to have the state constitutions translated into French. At least five different editions of the constitutions were published in France between 1776 and 1786. By 1784 Adams noted that “the Philosophers are speculating upon our Constitutions.” He hoped that they “will throw out Hints, which will be of Use to our Countrymen.”36
That same year, the British dissenting minister Richard Price published in London his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World, and it was promptly republished in Boston. At the end of this pamphlet, Price included a letter he had earlier received from the French philosophe and former minister to Louis XVI Baron Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, who had died in 1781. In this 1778 letter, Turgot had criticized the revolutionary state constitutions drafted in 1776. Too many of them, he said, were based on the English constitution. “Instead of bringing all the authorities into one, that of the nation, they have established different bodies, a House of Representatives, a Council, a Governor, because England has a House of Commons, an House of lords, and a King.” The constitution-makers, he said, had misunderstood what republics required. Monarchies, Turgot said, may have needed “different authorities” to balance and offset “the enormous preponderance of royalty,” but republics, “formed on the equality of all citizens,” had no such need. Indeed, by constituting “different bodies” in their governments, the Americans had created “a source of divisions.” In other words, “by striving to prevent imaginary dangers, they have created real ones.”37
Turgot had a point. In 1776 most Americans rather unthinkingly had followed the English example in creating bicameral legislatures and separate governors. Their experience with their colonial constitutions, which they had regarded as miniature copies of the English constitution, and the influence of Adams’s Thoughts on Government, had dictated the structure of their new republics. But unlike Turgot or Adams, by creating such mixed constitutions most Americans had not assumed they were incorporating different bodies or estates in their governments; they simply had not thought through the implications of what they were doing.
When challenged on this issue that they were creating estates or separate bodies in their constitutions in the manner of the English constitution, most Americans began offering very different justifications of their bicameral legislatures and independent governors. By the 1780s it was becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for political leaders in America to justify their mixed and balanced constitutions as embodying estates or powers of the society. It was Adams’s unfortunate fate never to fully grasp this new development.
Reformers of the controversial Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, for example, very much wanted to replace the unicameral assembly with a legislature that contained a senate as well as a lower house. But as soon as they voiced this reform, defenders of the original constitution accused them of being “a junto of gentlemen in Philadelphia, who wished to trample upon the farmers and mechanics, to establish a wicked aristocracy, and to introduce a House of Lords, hoping to become members of it.” In response, the critics of the unicameral legislature denied any intention of foisting an aristocracy on the state. Instead, they argued that the upper house was necessary only as a means of checking the power of a single legislature. It had no social significance whatsoever. It would simply be “a double representation of the people.” The two houses “would both draw their power from the same source—from the people, the fountain of all authority.” Therefore they would not have opposite interests, but only the single interest of the people. The very thing that Jefferson and others had worried about—the homogeneity of interests between the two houses in a bicameral legislature—was now celebrated as a good thing.38
Others began drawing out the implications of having a double representation of the people. If the people could be represented twice, why couldn’t they be represented three or more times? It was this extraordinary expansion of the idea of representation that enabled the Massachusetts convention in 1780 to label the governor, simply because he was elected by the people at large, “emphatically the Representative of the whole People.”39 The process of popular election by itself made an official a representative of the people.
Everywhere in the states in the early 1780s, the traditional theory of mixed government was fast giving way to the idea that all parts of the state governments were in some way or another representatives of the people. Although Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia had complained that the senate in Virginia, “being chosen by the same electors, at the same time, and out of the same subjects,” was “too homogeneous with the house of delegates,” he had no admiration whatsoever for the English constitution and did not see the senate as embodying any sort of aristocratic order or estate. Because in his Summary View pamphlet of 1774 he had declared that “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people,” he was already primed to think of all officers of government as representatives of the people.40
• • •
JOHN ADAMS WAS A CONSPICUOUS EXCEPTION to all these popularizing developments. No American was more infatuated with the English constitution; even his old radical Whig English friend Thomas Brand Hollis chided him for being so excessively fond of the English constitution, especially since Hollis believed that it had become defective and unbalanced.41 Certainly Adams more than any other American leader clung tightly to the traditional theory that underlay the English constitution—that the three powers or orders of society were embodied in all governments that contained bicameral legislatures and independent executives.
Because most Americans were rapidly abandoning the English theory of mixed government or had never firmly grasped it in the first place, they paid little or
no attention to Turgot’s criticism of their constitutions. Adams, however, was different. Being enamored of the English constitution and knowing exactly what Turgot was getting at, he was outraged by the Frenchman’s criticism. Since he rightly believed that he had been most responsible for the form and structure of the revolutionary state constitutions, he took Turgot’s criticism personally. In fact, he claimed “that Mr. Turgot’s crude idea is really a personal attack upon me, whether he knew it or not.” Therefore, it was only proper, he said, that the defense of the constitutions should come from Adams himself.42
The result was his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America—that huge, three-volume, jumbled conglomeration of political glosses on a single theme. No government, Adams contended, could long remain stable and free unless it placed each of the principal social orders—the people and the aristocracy—in separate houses of the legislature and balanced them by an independent executive. The common people he knew about, from his background in Braintree and his law practice, if from nothing else, and he was well aware of their anarchical passions. All history was full of examples of the people robbing and plundering the rich. It was evident that the people, unrestrained, were “as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous, and cruel as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power.”43 Nevertheless, it was the aristocracy that he was most worried about.
• • •
ADAMS HAD BEEN THINKING ABOUT writing a book on aristocracy for several years, certainly by the early 1780s, when Jefferson first joined him in Paris.44 In 1813 he reminded Jefferson how both of them in 1784 had spent “a whole evening” in Jefferson’s apartments being “harrangued” by the Marquis de Lafayette on “the plans then in Operation to reform France.” Adams recalled being “astonished at the Grossness of his Ignorance of Government and History.” It was what others—“Turgot, Rochefaucault, Condorcet, and Franklin”—had been saying for years. “This gross Ideology” of all those Frenchmen and those Frenchified liberals like Franklin—their obsession with democracy and a single-house legislature—was what “first suggested” to him the “thought and inclination . . . of writing Something upon Aristocracy.”45
But listening to Lafayette and reading the likes of Turgot could never by themselves have provoked Adams’s fascination with the subject of aristocracy. He had read so much history—more, surely, than any other American of his generation—and all that history, from ancient Rome to Renaissance Italy and eighteenth-century England, had stressed over and over the inevitability of patricians distinguishing themselves from plebeians. For a moment in early 1786 he thought that this social distinction might not be inevitable after all; indeed, perhaps it could even be eliminated.
In a letter written on January 21, 1786, to his eccentric French friend Count Sarsfield, Adams said that he had “half a mind to devote the next ten years to the making of a book on the subject of nobility.” He wished “to inquire into the practice of all nations, ancient and modern, civilized and savage, under all religions,—Mahometan, Christian, and Pagan,—to see how far the division of mankind into patricians and plebeians, nobles and simple, is necessary and inevitable, and how far it is not.” If this distinction was man-made, created by art, then perhaps, he told Sarsfield, it could be unmade, which would be a good thing.46
This notion that aristocracy might be done away with by artful means was for Adams a momentary fancy tossed off playfully to a friend. Once he got serious about his inquiry into the nature of aristocracy, he quickly concluded that such patricians not only were inevitable in every society but were based on the inequality of people that was rooted in nature.
Of course, there was nothing really new or unusual about Adams’s division of the society into the few and many, into gentlemen and commoners, aristocrats and democrats. Many Americans in the 1780s believed that every developed society always divided into the few and the many and that each needed to defend itself against the other. “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few,” said Alexander Hamilton in 1787. “Give all power to the few they will oppress the many.”47 By the 1780s the conflict between gentlemen and commoners had become conventional wisdom for many northern elites, but it had become increasingly politically incorrect to contend publicly that each house of a bicameral legislature should embody these two social contestants.
Adams distinguished himself from his contemporaries by his obvious willingness to boldly and publicly admit the need to represent the social orders in separate houses of the legislatures. But even more important in setting himself apart from his colleagues was his conviction that since the social division between aristocrats and commoners was inevitable and existed in every society, it needed to be understood scientifically. That is why his Defence of the Constitutions spent little or no time analyzing the American state constitutions themselves. In Adams’s mind it was enough to demonstrate that their structure was based on a scientifically established principle of government that encompassed different peoples over centuries of time. “Nations,” he said, “move by unalterable rules,” by the same kinds of laws and regularities as the heavenly bodies.48
Others may have taken the social division between gentlemen and commoners for granted, but he wanted to know where this pervasive difference between the few and the many, the rich and the poor, came from. Why did some people always emerge as aristocrats while others remained as commoners? Adams, in effect, was trying to work out his own “iron law of oligarchy.”49
• • •
HIS IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY was reinforced by his personal experience with snobbery and inequality. He knew what aristocrats were like, not just those he experienced in Europe but also those he knew in America. As a young aspiring lawyer, he had resented “all the great Notions of high Family” displayed by the Winslows, Hutchinsons, Leonards, Saltonstalls, and Chandlers; and he hated their presumption of superiority, for, he said, it was “vain and mean to esteem oneself for his Ancestors Merit.”50 Even as the Revolution made him one of the gentry-aristocratic leaders, his resentment of aristocracy continued to haunt him. Those who considered themselves his social superiors, he believed, had envied his outspokenness in the Continental Congress in the 1770s, and in subsequent years they had continued to throw out hints about the lowness of his birth and obscurity of his ancestry.
Although Adams always said that he was the last man in the world to claim any benefit in favor of blood, he was proud of his ancestry, and he was deeply angered by all the aspersions cast upon it. He believed his ancestry was comparable “with the Descent of any of the Grandees of any Part of America.” He was bitter “at the low Cunning and mean Craft of those who talk and Scribble upon this Subject” of ancestry. But he was also angry “at the Meanness and Inconsistency of the American public for tolerating this Insolence and much more for encouraging it.” In Adams’s mind his behavior had been so virtuous that his enemies had nothing else “but lies about his Birth and Conduct, to get him out of the Way.” The accumulation of resentments over the years lay behind much of his obsession with aristocracy.51
Even his own relatively egalitarian state of Massachusetts possessed aristocrats whose self-interestedness and power always impressed him. He was keenly aware of the social conflict between creditors and debtors in Massachusetts and saw how the state’s elites exerted their powerful influence in handling it, especially during those several months in 1779 when he was drafting the state’s new constitution.
From at least 1774 on, many farmers in the western counties of Massachusetts had been in a state of virtual rebellion. In Hampshire County the courts had been closed since 1774 and did not open again until 1778; in Berkshire County the courts did not open until the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 had gone into effect. Even after the formation of the new state constitution, extralegal committees and conventions continued to protest the existence of the senate and the overwhelming hard-money interests of eastern creditors in the governme
nt.
These eastern gentry-creditors, fearful of the social unrest and debtor protests, had influenced the design of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, especially in creating the peculiar character of the senate as the representation of property. As the principal drafter of the constitution, Adams had felt their intense pressure to shape the senate to their liking. In 1779 he had seen the Massachusetts east-coast gentry up close, men such as John Lowell, George Cabot, Nathaniel Tracy, Jonathan Jackson, and Theophilus Parsons, many from Essex County, and he had been fascinated by the way in which they had exerted their influence in establishing the Massachusetts senate in the face of much popular opposition. Out of that experience Adams had come to appreciate more fully than ever before the power and influence of the aristocracy in public life. At the same time, he had come to realize that unless constrained and segregated, the rich and wellborn might pose an even greater danger to free government than the common people.
• • •
SUDDENLY JEAN DE LOLME’S new understanding of the English constitution as a struggle between aristocracy and democracy took on a heightened meaning for Adams. De Lolme’s suggestion that the aristocracy was more dangerous than the democracy obviously impressed him. But he was not the only Massachusetts man to read De Lolme and experience the social conflict that lay behind the writing of the Massachusetts constitution.
Beginning in 1784, twenty-eight-year-old Benjamin Lincoln Jr., a Harvard graduate, son of the Revolutionary War general Benjamin Lincoln, and one of the eastern elites, published a series of articles under the pseudonym of “The Free Republican” that anticipated John Adams’s Defence at nearly every major point.52
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