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By Root 1851 0

legal government had effectively collapsed by 1775. Royal governors prevented legislatures from meeting, courts ceased to sit, and power flowed to the committees and conventions that were conducting the real business of resistance. But as they moved toward independence in the spring of 1776, Americans also became anxious to restore legal government. Simply reviving the old colonial governments would not do, because in every colony but Connecticut and Rhode Island executive and judicial officials drew their authority either from the Crown or the proprietary governors who represented the Penn family in Pennsylvania and Delaware or the Calvert family in Maryland. New governments would have to be created, and this in turn required the adoption of formal written constitutions.

In his Thoughts on Government, John Adams sketched the kind of constitution he believed Americans should adopt. Adams insisted on one critical point: Americans should become republicans, designing governments that would derive all their authority from the people. Just how popular these governments should be remained a matter of dispute. Other writers argued, for example, that the new American commonwealths would need to create upper legislative chambers modeled on the House of Lords as a check on the more democratic lower houses. These and other issues were vigorously debated in the spring and summer of 1776, especially after the Continental Congress in mid-May adopted a blanket resolution authorizing all of the colonies to institute new governments on republican principles.

Perhaps the two most important and influential examples of this process were the constitutions framed for the populous states of Virginia and Pennsylvania. Of the two, Pennsylvania’s was the more radical. It retained the unicameral legislature that William Penn had established a century earlier, and replaced the office of governor with a multi-member executive council. Virginia’s constitution was more typical in retaining a bicameral legislature and a governor elected annually by the assembly.

The provincial conventions that wrote these constitutions also adopted declarations of rights as accompanying statements of the principles by which the new governments should operate. These declarations enumerated some of the basic civil rights and liberties to which Americans believed they were entitled. But they were meant to serve less as legally enforceable bills of rights, as we now think of them, than as reminders of the basic principles of republican rule, addressed to citizens and officials alike.

—John Adams—

THOUGHTS ON GOVERNMENT

APRIL 1776

IF I WAS EQUAL to the task of forming a plan for the government of a colony, I should be flattered with your request, and very happy to comply with it; because as the divine science of politicks is the science of social happiness, and the blessings of society depend entirely on the constitutions of government, which are generally institutions that last for many generations, there can be no employment more agreeable to a benevolent mind, than a research after the best.

Pope9 flattered tyrants too much when he said,

“For forms of government let fools contest,

That which is best administered is best.”

Nothing can be more fallacious than this: But poets read history to collect flowers not fruits—they attend to fanciful images, not the ef fects of social institutions. Nothing is more certain from the history of nations, and the nature of man, than that some forms of government are better fitted for being well administered than others.

We ought to consider, what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all Divines and moral Philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government, which communicates ease, comfort, security, or in one word happiness to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree,