John Adams: “Letters of Novanglus”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In December 1774, Adams began reading essays by “Massachusettensis” (Daniel Leonard) in Boston's Massachusetts Gazette. He expected some other penman to oppose this spirited attack on the Patriot movement; when no one stepped forward, Adams placed his first Novanglus letter in the Boston Gazette on January 23, 1775. Eleven more learned essays, replete with historical details and citations to colonial and British proclamations, laws, and court decisions running back for centuries, appeared in the same journal, the last on April 17, and Adams had another essay ready for the next issue when the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19 abruptly ended polite exchanges in the local press. Taken together, the twelve serially published “Letters of Novanglus,” running to nearly two hundred pages, comprised Adams's longest composition before his three-volume Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. The letters appeared anonymously and were first published under his name in a collected edition in 1784.

The first four letters recount in detail the struggles between Massachusetts Whigs (Patriots) and Tories (later, Loyalists) since 1760. In the fifth letter, dated March 6, 1775, Adams characterizes the Patriots' opposition to tyrannical government as lawful resistance, not rebellion, and examines both the Massachusetts and British constitutions. In the brief excerpt reproduced here, he comments on the word rebellion, arguing that the colonists' opposition to “usurpation and lawless violence” is not rebellion; rebellion is resistance to lawful authority. Although Adams wrote the Novanglus letters primarily in response to Massachusettensis, he also wrote in response to an anonymous pamphlet published in 1774 titled Letter from a Veteran to the Officers of the Army Encamped at Boston, possibly written by Robert A. Prescott. Like Massachusettensis, the “Veteran” wrote from a Tory—that is, Loyalist—perspective. In the pamphlet the “Veteran” notes that in war even the word rebel is a convertible term, suggesting that the word can have opposite connotations, one negative and one positive, depending on whose perspective is taken.

Adams's argument reaches its climax in the seventh letter, dated March 27, 1775. Here he extends the claim of autonomy he makes for Massachusetts to several other American colonies. He begins his argument for American autonomy by first pointing out that the colonies were established before the “British empire” came into being during the reign of Queen Anne by an act of Parliament that united England and Scotland. On this ground Adams argues that any concept that “the colonies are a part of the British empire” is dubious. He goes on to raise a number of questions about the relationship between a colony and a mother country. If a colony is to be regarded as “a part of the state,” then its inhabitants should enjoy “equal right, powers, and privileges, as well as equal protection” as the citizens of the mother country. Adams, however, suggests that America has not been made part of the British realm, principally because it does not have representation in Parliament.

Adams then agrees with the principle that “two supreme and independent authorities cannot exist in the same state.” To Adams, the logical conclusion of this principle is that the provincial legislature should reign supreme in the colonies. In what could be considered a note of defiance, Adams acknowledges that “Parliament has our consent to assume a jurisdiction” over the seas that separate Britain and the Americas. Finally, Adams argues that the American colonies cannot be part of a “British empire” because no such entity exists. Rather, he points out, Britain is a “limited monarchy,” and he declares that “the British constitution is much more like a republic than an empire” because it is “a government of laws, and not of men.” A republic, he argues, is a government controlled by laws and providing for the active participation of the whole people. Within those limits, it may be constructed in several different ways, even around an inherited monarchy. Adams's countrymen would never follow him to this last conclusion, but he would defend it again at great length in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.