Five-minute digest
A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America
Summary
John Adams wrote A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in London, where he was serving as the first American minister to Great Britain. The occasion was a letter of 1778 from the French statesman Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot to the English minister Richard Price, published by Price in 1784, which regretted that most American states had imitated England with a governor, a council and an assembly instead of collecting all authority into one centre, the nation. Adams answered with an immense survey of governments past and present, meant to show that a single assembly would not secure liberty and that every free state needs a balance among the one, the few and the many. The first volume, dated from Grosvenor Square on January 1, 1787, was published in London by Charles Dilly that year and quickly reprinted in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, where it circulated while the Federal Convention was meeting. Volumes II and III, chiefly on the republics of medieval Italy and on Marchamont Nedham, followed in 1787 and 1788. The library text is Volume I only, as revised by Adams's grandson Charles Francis Adams for the Works of 1851, who replaced the original division into letters to a friend with chapters. Adams's Preface hails the thirteen state constitutions as governments founded on the authority of the people by reason and study, without claims of miracle, and names three modern discoveries in free government: representation, the separation of the executive from the legislature, and a balance in the legislature by three independent branches. Chapters I to III then review modern republics: the democratic Swiss cantons, San Marino and Biscay; the aristocracies of Bern, Geneva, Genoa and Venice; the United Provinces, Poland, Neuchâtel and England. Each has some first magistrate and some senate, a pattern Adams draws out in a recapitulation. Chapter IV weighs the opinions of Swift, Franklin and Price; Chapter V the writers Machiavelli, Sidney, Montesquieu and Harrington; and Chapter VI the historians and philosophers, beginning with Polybius on mixed government and including Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plato, Locke, Milton and Hume. Chapters VII to IX turn to antiquity: the democracies of Athens, Carthage and the Greek cities, the aristocracies of Rome, Sparta and Croton, and the kingly republics of the ancient Germans and Homer's Ithaca. The Conclusion restates the case: three branches of power have a foundation in nature, legislative and executive must be separated, and the executive needs a negative to defend itself. Adams ends by imagining how a single sovereign assembly would actually appoint generals, officers and ambassadors, and argues that it would drift toward aristocracy and faction. The book made Adams known as the leading American theorist of mixed and balanced government.
Top Lessons
Balance among the one, the few and the many
Adams argues that every society contains a first magistrate, a group of leading men and the body of the people, whatever names they bear. Liberty is secure only when each has its own branch and none can absorb the others. His survey of Swiss cantons, Italian cities and ancient Greece is meant to show what happens when one order is left without a counterweight.
Giving ambition a place where it can be watched
Adams believed that the rich, the well-born and the able will always gain influence over a popular assembly. Instead of pretending otherwise, he would separate them into a senate where their talents serve the public and their influence is checked by the other branches. He calls this an ostracism that honours rather than banishes.
History as the laboratory of politics
Adams compares the framers of the state constitutions to a wise architect who studies Vitruvius, Palladio and the ruins of famous buildings before designing a palace. The Defence applies that method on a large scale, collecting the experience of dozens of republics so that Americans can adopt what has worked and avoid what has failed.
A strong executive guards the people's rights
In the Preface and the Conclusion Adams argues that the people's liberties can never be preserved without separating executive power from the legislature and giving the executive a negative. His closing sketch of a single assembly that must itself appoint every officer shows how mixing the powers produces delay, patronage and the rise of a few families.
Verified Quotes
“Corruption in elections is the great enemy of freedom.”
“The perfection of the portrait consists in its likeness.”
“The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.”
“Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”
“As the treble, the tenor, and the bass exist in nature, they will be heard in the concert.”
“What is the ingredient which in England has preserved the democratical authority? The balance, and that only.”
“The institutions now made in America will not wholly wear out for thousands of years. It is of the last importance, then, that they should begin right.”
“The president of Pennsylvania might, upon such an occasion, have recollected one of Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion”
Medical Lens
The Defence has no medical subject. Its few medical touches are figures of speech or passing references: the Preface warns that executive power lodged in an assembly will corrupt the legislature as rust corrupts iron or arsenic poisons the body, and lists Zabdiel Boylston's practice of inoculation beside Franklin's electricity among American achievements in the arts and sciences.