John Adams: Report of a Constitution, or Form of Government, for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Report of a Constitution, used as a working model for the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 by the members of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, survives only in printed form. Over 90 percent of the text is considered to be the work of John Adams. The only paragraphs that he did not compose appear in article III of the “Declaration of Rights,” which perpetuated Massachusetts's religious establishment, and in chapter VI, section I, which guaranteed the rights of Harvard College. Because no manuscript text of this draft constitution has ever been found, however, there is no direct evidence to either confirm or refute Adams's claim that his committee colleagues changed no more than a few single lines of his prose before it was printed. Adams had the report published in London and Paris in 1780, but it was not made directly available to the American public until Charles Francis Adams included it in his edition of Adams's works in 1851.

In the report, Adams introduced a major innovation in constitutional architecture. In every prior constitution and in all American colonial charters extending back to the seventeenth century, the texts were quite unarticulated by clearly labeled sections and, in some cases, even by paragraphs. Adams, however, cast his document in an entirely new form. He carefully divided his text into sections and chapters, with every sentence part of an enumerated article that occupied a logical place in the entire structure. This textual articulation greatly aided the study of the document by the convention members in 1779–1780 and by ensuing generations of legislators, governors, judges, lawyers, and the general public. And it did something more; by structuring his text so carefully, Adams invited everyone to visualize republican government and perceive how all of its parts related to the whole.

This first example was persuasive. When the framers of the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia produced their finished draft in September 1787, they employed a quite similar architectural design, thereby giving both constitutional thought and constitutional law an enhanced structure that they have retained to this day. Adams's constitution, revised in convention in 1779–1780, has acquired more than one hundred amendments over some two hundred years, but it remains in effect in Massachusetts. The selections, taken from the general “Preamble,” the “Declaration of Rights,” and the opening statement of the “Frame of Government,” convey the essence of John Adams's political philosophy.

Of all of Adams's major political works, his draft The Report of a Constitution is the easiest to summarize because of the care he took to organize and title each of its several parts. Adams begins with a “Preamble” that blends his introductory rhetoric from Thoughts on Government with Massachusetts's distinctive Puritan political convictions. Its essence is the statement “The end of the institution … of government is to secure the existence of the body-politic,” which Adams defines as “a voluntary association of individuals … a social compact.” He then sets out a “Declaration of Rights of the Inhabitants of Massachusetts” in thirty-one articles, several of which he freely borrowed from similar constitutional declarations in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other states. Nearly four-fifths of the report, however, is taken up with its “Frame of Government.” Opening with a celebrated pledge to observe the strict separation of governmental powers, the frame proceeds through five broad chapters devoted to the powers of the bicameral legislature; the powers of the executive (with its distinctive governor's council); the judiciary power; the choosing of delegates to Congress and the formal granting of commissions; and the preservation of Massachusetts's moral and cultural life by protecting Harvard Collage and encouraging local education.