John Adams: Thoughts on Government

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Thoughts on Government is both a product of Adams's public service and a personal statement of his constitutional beliefs. The genesis of the essay lay in his participation in congressional deliberations over the best advice to give the colonies as they sought to restructure their governments to function effectively in the rebellion against Britain. The specific impetus to publish this pamphlet came from congressional colleagues who sought his constitutional expertise for their home colonies. But the act of issuing his wise counsel in a general publication was voluntary and broadened Adams's audience from small clusters of colonial legislators to the whole American political public.

The core idea of Thoughts on Government was first expressed in Adams's letters of advice to congressional colleagues from Virginia, New Jersey, and North Carolina, beginning in November 1775. By the spring of 1776 he had expanded his argument to the point where his text was very close to that of Thoughts on Government. At this point publication seemed easier than continued copying for yet more congressmen. The pamphlet first appeared in Philadelphia in April 1776. Adams's good friend Benjamin Rush first identified him as its author in the spring of 1777. Thoughts on Government was the first American pamphlet to present a clear plan for organizing new governments on republican principles. Adams's generic model enabled any British colony to preserve its traditional liberties while waging a rebellion against British authority and was well suited for the anticipated state of total independence from the British Empire.

The essay's success rested on three features: its brevity, its simplicity, and its flexibility. By paring away all the historical and philosophical considerations that had filled the pages of his “Letters of Novanglus,” Adams produced an effective republican blueprint in just nine pages. Adams's architecture, too, was simple; he listed the minimum ingredients that he thought were essential for republican government: an executive, a two-house legislature, and an independent judiciary. Because he was addressing men who lived in several different colonies with different habits and traditions, he largely ignored the mechanics of nominations and elections, insisting that it was the larger republican idea, the vital principle of resting the government on the whole people and bringing them into the political process, that was crucial to the successful remodeling of authority in America's new political environment.

Adams's recommendations on republican architecture clearly derive from his intimate knowledge of Massachusetts's government, but he presents his advice in such a generalized way that most of the rebelling thirteen colonies could easily attend his lesson. He first states that the end of government is “the happiness of society” and that only a government founded on promoting human virtue can achieve this. All English political philosophers, he continues, agree that “there is no good government but what is republican.” Adams then identifies a representative assembly that is “an exact portrait of the people at large” as the core of any republic. A fully competent republic, however, must vest executive power in one person (a governor), establish an independent judiciary, and create a council (an upper legislative house) to mediate between the people's assembly and the executive. The rest of his pamphlet discusses various mechanisms for choosing the council, the governor, and other officers and concedes that several different electoral devices and roles may be effective. He closes with a deep appreciation of America's bright prospects: “How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election [a choice] of government, more than of air, soil, or climate, for themselves and their children.”

Thoughts on Government was one of Adams's most important political works. It immediately influenced the writing of new republican constitutions for New Jersey, Virginia, and North Carolina, and later in New Hampshire and New York; by 1777 this brief essay had come to embody the orthodox concept of American republicanism. Over time, Adams's model republic appeared in several more American guises, first in his own Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, then in the U.S. Constitution, and finally in both the revised constitutions of several old states and the first constitutions of many new states that entered the Union over the next two centuries.