On March 19, 1776—two days after America’s Continental Army forced the British Army to evacuate Boston—John Adams, attending Congress in Philadelphia, wrote to his wife Abigail, at home in Massachusetts, in reply to her inquiry about the public reception of America’s first “best seller,” Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. That anonymous author’s “Sentiments of the Abilities of America, and of the Difficulty of a Reconciliation with Great Britain are generally approved,” he began. “But his Notions, and Plans of Continental Government are not much applauded. Indeed this Writer has a better Hand at pulling down than building.”

　　Adams continued that several persons “through the Continent” were saying that he had written the bold tract. “But altho I could not have written any Thing in so manly and striking a style, I flatter myself I should have made a more respectable Figure as an Architect, if I had undertaken such a Work” he wrote. “This Writer seems to have very inadequate Ideas of what is proper and necessary to be done, in order to form Constitutions for single Colonies, as well as a great Model of Union for the whole.”

　　Just over a month later, Adams’s short pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, also published anonymously, appeared in Philadelphia. Its succinct argument, the briefest and one of the most effective that Adams ever wrote, has sometimes been regarded as a reply to the shortcomings he saw in Paine’s understanding of constitutional government. But Adams’s intentions in writing this piece had almost nothing to do with Common Sense.

　　Thoughts on Government was the product of over a decade of reading, pondering, public speaking, and occasionally writing for publication, nearly always anonymously, in both the European and British republican traditions, an intellectual legacy that Adams freely acknowledged in his essay. It was also the termination of nearly a year of impassioned oral arguments, in committees and on the floor of Congress, in favor of written constitutions that could enable British North America’s rebelling colonies to govern themselves as nearly autonomous republics, and to unite in a union with sufficient strength to separate from the powerful British Empire. Yet despite Adams’s exceptional intellectual preparation for this pamphlet, he never intended to publish Thoughts on Government. The work grew out of a sequence of private letters written for his congressional colleagues, one of whom decided, without Adams’s knowledge, to send it to the printer. It was advertised for sale on April 22, 1776.

　　John Adams first confronted the problem of reforming a provincial government to face the challenge of conducting an armed rebellion against the British Empire, while also delivering law and order recognized as legitimate by the public, when his own province sought formal approval from the Second Continental Congress for its de facto government in May 1775. He participated in the ensuing debate, but soon accepted the decision of Congress to recommend the least alteration in Massachusetts’s government that would be effective in a province that was in armed rebellion: a fresh election of its provincial assembly, the selection of a new governor’s council by the assembly, and a declaration that the governor’s chair was vacant (although General Gage had not gone anywhere) thereby allowing the council to perform all necessary executive actions, and to open the courts for the first time since the spring of 1774. This revival of the provincial Charter of 1691 went into effect in July 1775, and remained Massachusetts’s framework of government until 1780, when it was replaced by a new constitution—written largely by John Adams.

　　In the summer and fall of 1775, the disintegration of imperial authority that had begun in Massachusetts the year before now spread north, south, and west, to every colony, and their governors soon fled to the safety of nearby Royal Navy vessels, or to colonies still under the control of the Crown. Adams, after a brief visit back home, faced this new challenge soon after his return to Congress.

　　Adams recognized the need for flexibility to accommodate the differing political convictions attached to differing colonial frames of government.

　　In October 1775, New Hampshire, whose governor bolted the previous spring, sought Congress’s advice on setting up a new government. This sparked a spirited debate over the need and the propriety for the delegates to recommend any government to a colony that was not yet, unlike Massachusetts, in armed conflict with Britain. John Adams immediately took the floor, insisted that Congress must respond, and made several suggestions on the form a new government might take. His colleagues finally agreed to act, and on November 3, Congress encouraged New Hampshire to “establish such a form of Government, as in their Judgment will best produce the happiness of the People, and most effectually secure Peace and good Order in the Province, during the Continuance of the present dispute between Great Britain and the Colonies.”

　　Adams was not happy with such a bland reply, which Congress repeated the next day, in nearly identical language, to a similar request from South Carolina. But he was pleased that Congress had replied at all, and on one other point he was relieved. When the debate began, he feared that the delegates, nearly all hostile to the powers of royal governors that their colonies had endured for a century or more, would insist on a plural executive—a small council—in any new governments. Worse yet, some congressmen, he believed, would favor unicameral legislatures and deny their councils any legislative powers. Such unbalanced political forces, he believed, Congress had avoided endorsing by sending New Hampshire and South Carolina replies that encouraged them to devise new governments, without specifying any particular form of government.

　　And almost immediately, one of his closest congressional allies, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, asked Adams to summarize the features that he believed would make a good provincial government. Adams replied on November 15, with a two-page letter that listed most of the points he would develop five months later in Thoughts on Government. But in 1775, Adams’s ideal frame of government was far short of what he would propose the following spring. In several details, his letter betrayed the thought of a man who, while already warming to the idea of full independence for the American colonies, still felt ties to the British Empire. He called his proposed lower legislative chamber a “House of Commons”, and said his governor, elected jointly by his bicameral legislature, could be chosen “annually, triennially, or Septennially”—the maximum term of Britain’s unreformed House of Commons. Finally, he avoided the opportunity to label his new provincial governments “republics,” and made no reference to the republican political tradition, which he had briefly but boldly explored the previous winter in his Novanglus letters, and which would move to the foreground of Thoughts on Government in the spring.

　　There the matter stood until March, 1776, when two North Carolina congressmen who were about to return home to attend a provincial convention asked Adams for his view of a good government just as he was composing for Abigail his critique of Paine’s Common Sense. He obligingly wrote similar but distinct letters for each colleague, and when Virginia’s George Wythe heard of this, he asked for yet another letter. When Richard Henry Lee asked for a letter for himself, Adams, tiring of writing repeatedly on the same topic—although political thought was always one of his favorite subjects—replied that Lee should make a copy of his letter to Wythe. Lee, without Adams’s knowledge, sent the Wythe letter to John Dunlap, the printer to Congress, who produced Thoughts on Government.

　　In all these letters Adams’s intentions were very different from his modest goal in the fall of 1775. Then he wanted America’s provinces to form new governments, largely on existing colonial models, that would be strong enough to support the rebellion until they could settle their differences with Great Britain, even though he feared they would not reach a satisfactory settlement.

　　Since the late summer of 1775, however, Britain’s government showed no sign of even listening to the Americans’ complaints. Instead, George III had declared the thirteen colonies in a state of rebellion, and rumors soon reached Philadelphia that Britain was seeking foreign mercenaries to assist their armies in subduing the rebels. Confirmation that the ministry had contracted with German princes to hire several thousand soldiers did not reach America until early May, but Adams’s letters of March-April 1776 were already seeking a new objective. His immediate goal was to encourage the formation of new governments that could endure indefinitely, and which had as their basis a commitment to a new, international model, that of a republic. His ultimate but not very distant goal was to persuade his countrymen to leave the British Empire.

　　Thoughts on Government opened with two broad propositions: that history taught that the proper object of government was “the happiness of society”, and that both philosophy and religion, in all nations, agreed that “the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.” Therefore, the “noblest principles and most generous affections in our nature … have the fairest chance to support the noblest and most generous models of government.”

　　John Adams located such models in America’s memory, then fallen out of fashion in Britain, of the English nation that had rebelled against and eventually thrown off the Stuart despotism:

　　A man must be indifferent to the sneers of modern Englishmen to mention in their company the names of Sydney, Harrington, Locke, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, and Hoadley. No small fortitude is necessary to confess that one has read them. The wretched condition of this country, however, for ten or fifteen years past, has frequently reminded me of their principles and reasonings. They will convince any candid mind, that there is no good government but what is Republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so, because the very definition of a Republic, is ‘an Empire of Laws, and not of men.’

　　Adams then proceeded to the heart of his argument: the recommendation of a plan of government derived from three sources. The first in the order of its entry into John Adams’s mind, but hidden beneath his list of particular actions to be taken, was Massachusetts’s still-operative Charter of 1691. The second was the need for flexibility to accommodate the differing political convictions attached to differing colonial frames of government. Adams candidly acknowledged both influences in letters to close friends and political colleagues back home in Massachusetts. The third, of course, was his general appeal to the republican tradition, the conviction that men living, or aspiring to live, under a free government had both the right and the capacity to choose both constitutional provisions and broader political values from the Greek, Roman, Italian, and British writers who had espoused them across two millennia.

　　Most of his recommended provisions were already familiar to many of his readers, either because they already existed in royal colonies or were changes that were keenly desired by men in rebellion against British rule. His key requirements were a bicameral legislature, with the larger lower house selecting the smaller council; the joint election of a governor by all the legislators; the provision for a smaller council, drawn from the larger, to advise the governor on appointments and other executive matters; and an independent judiciary, with every judge holding his office for life, upon good behavior.

　　By May 1776, Adams found himself at the center of Congress’s drive for the immediate creation of new constitutions that would totally suppress British authority in America.

　　One point, however, was quite new: the conviction that all elective officers should face “rotation in office”—that is to say, term limits. This was the only advice that Adams later revisited. In 1779 he omitted rotation from his draft of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and later he flatly opposed the idea. But in sharp contrast to his advice to Richard Henry Lee in November 1775, he now thought that all elections should be annual. This, he wrote, would teach “these great men … the political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.”

　　After a brief itemization of a few remaining details, such as the legislature’s power of impeachment, Adams concluded his plan with a liberal provision for the public education of all young men, regardless of class, in every community in his new republic. This was essential to maintain the sound morals and civic virtue of the people. And if Americans would compare such a republic “with the regions of domination, whether Monarchical or Aristocratical”, he declared, they would “fancy” themselves “in Arcadia or Elisium.”

　　But Thoughts on Government had begun as a letter before Richard Henry Lee turned it into a pamphlet, and Adams gave it a personal close that united his sense of history with his vision of America’s republican future:

　　You and I, my dear Friend, have been sent into life, at a time when the greatest law-givers of antiquity would have wished to have lived. How few of the human race have ever enjoyed the opportunity of making an election of government more than of air, soil, or climate, for themselves and their children. When! Before the present epocha, had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?

　　One cannot say with certainty how many of America’s first state constitutions were directly shaped by the recommendations of this elegant and profound political tract. But the frames of government that soon appeared, and the direct connection of the recipients of Adams’s original letters with North Carolina and Virginia, suggest a strong influence. Five state constitutions framed between May and December 1776, in Virginia, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina, did take the general form that Adams advocated, while just one, Pennsylvania’s radical unicameral constitution (September 1776), violated nearly every political principle that John Adams held dear. Later constitutional creations and revisions in New York (1777), South Carolina (1778), New Hampshire (1784), and Georgia and Pennsylvania (both in 1790), produced governments closer to Adams’s vision.

　　Adams’s own Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, of course, closely followed his plan of 1776, but with important new clauses, both by Adams and by the constitutional convention that revised his original draft. And that document also influenced both the state constitutions that followed it and the federal constitution in 1787.

　　But beyond the immediate constitutional influence of Thoughts on Government, there is a certain irony. When John Adams told Abigail in March 1776 that if he had written Common Sense, he would have been a less effective polemicist but a better constitutional architect than Thomas Paine, he had no idea how soon he would contribute to both new state constitutions and to Independence. By May, he found himself at the center of Congress’s drive for the immediate creation of new constitutions that would totally suppress British authority in America. The vital importance of these constitutional foundations for separating from the British Empire made John Adamss role in delivering the closing argument for Independence on July 1, on the floor of Congress, particularly appropriate.