John Adams: A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Against the Attack of M. Turgot, in His Letter to Dr. Price, Dated the Twenty-Second Day of March, 1778, which swelled to three long volumes published in 1787–1788, was originally intended as an answer to a recently published letter by the late French philosophe and government minister Anne-Robert Turgot. This letter criticized America's state constitutions for their separation of powers, checks and balances, and two-house legislatures—the very features of America's governments of which Adams was most proud. The Defence itself, however, devotes few pages to addressing Turgot's critique and even fewer to defending any American state constitution. Instead, Adams surveys dozens of republican constitutions from ancient Athens to contemporary European nations and reviews political writers from Plato and Polybius to Machiavelli and Montesquieu, all to prove that only balanced governments that incorporate checks and balances could ensure the stability and survival of any republic.

The Defence is Adams's longest work and has certain features in common with the “Letters of Novanglus.” Like that work, the Defence lacks any comprehensive organization and shows unmistakable evidence that Adams did not carefully structure his text in advance but mostly carpentered it together as he went along. It is not at all certain that Adams, when he began to write, intended to produce more than a single volume. It seems more likely that as his vision of his subject grew, so did his ambition. This work also has a more unusual feature. Of all Adams's writings, only the Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (that is to say, a defense of America's state constitutions framed since 1776) bears a title that seems to be so disconnected from its contents. At no point in its three volumes does Adams discuss any American state constitution, even that of Massachusetts. Instead, he chooses to defend America's constitutions by asserting—without making explicit comparisons—that they resembled the other republican constitutions he does discuss, past and present, that succeeded, and differed from yet others that failed. In the last paragraph of his final volume, written just after he had read the new federal Constitution, he briefly praises that document as demonstrating the validity of his entire work, but without making a single concrete observation on it.

Yet Adams's Defence was a remarkable achievement. It is the most learned study of comparative republican governments by any American in the eighteenth century and the last important work of political science written in the classical republican tradition that had begun with the Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli nearly three centuries earlier. The two selections, from the “Recapitulation” of his opening chapters in volume 1 and from his general “Conclusion” at the end of volume 3, together give a sense of his commitment to the separation and balance of powers as the key to the durability of republican governments.

The greater part of the Defence is devoted to comparative republican history. In over two-thirds of volume 1, all of volume 2, and over half of volume 3, Adams closely examines some four dozen modern, medieval, and ancient republics of widely varying character. He interrupts these investigations only twice, to consider several political writers in volume 1 and one more writer toward the end of volume 3. The most distinctive feature of volume 1 is its classification of twenty-five eighteenth-century governments into three categories, as democratic, aristocratic, or monarchical republics, in its first three chapters. In the “Recapitulation,” then, he summarizes the characteristics of successful republican governments, noting that they all have a “first magistrate,” a senate, a house of representatives, checks and balances among the branches of government, “orders” of offices but not of men, and flourishing arts and sciences. Then, following three chapters on the political opinions of three “philosophers” (all recent or contemporary writers), four “writers on government” (from Machiavelli to Montesquieu), and six “historians” (from Plato to David Hume), Adams turns to sixteen ancient republics, again arranging them into democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical categories. It was this first volume, with its praise of England's monarchical constitution as the finest of all republics outside America, which so disturbed many of Adams's countrymen upon its appearance in the spring of 1787. Adams's second and third volumes, devoted entirely to medieval Italian republics and to the seventeenth-century English writer Marchemont Nedham, had far less impact in America.