How The Massachusetts Constitution Shaped American Government

John Adams has a branding problem. If your mental picture comes from a musical, a miniseries, or the vague sense that he “wanted to be king,” we put that claim on trial by reading his work where it matters most: the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the oldest functioning written constitution and a direct ancestor of the U.S. Constitution. We’re joined by Dr. Beienberg to trace what Adams actually argues for and why the rest of the founding generation quietly treats Massachusetts as the model.

We dig into the Declaration of Rights and the tradeoffs baked into the final text: stronger protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, puzzling omissions like a dropped free speech clause, and a right to arms that lands weaker than you might expect. Then we move under the hood to Adams’s signature contribution to American government: separation of powers. Two legislative chambers, an independently elected governor, an empowered judiciary, and procedural rules that get “copied and pasted” into federal practice all show how constitutional structure can restrain ambition and channel conflict.

We also take on the parts that make modern readers squirm and the parts that should stop you cold. One line about being “born free and equal” helps end slavery in Massachusetts, while other sections assume state support for religion is necessary for civic virtue and a stable republic. Finally, we connect Adams’s fears about oligarchy, money in politics, and moral formation to questions we still argue about today.

If this changed how you see John Adams, subscribe, share the episode with a fellow history nerd, and leave a review. What’s one Adams idea you think the U.S. still needs?

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Transcript

Skepticism About John Adams

0:00

Welcome back to Civics in Year. If you have not listened to the previous episode on Ben Franklin and the Pennsylvania Constitution, please do so. Today, Dr. Beinberg and I are talking about John Adams and the Massachusetts Constitution. And I was telling Dr. Beinberg that he's going to have to convince me on John Adams because I think because of multiple reasons, but really the Hamilton play just soured me on John Adams. I do watch the John Adams HBO miniseries almost every July 4th. But John Adams to me just always seemed like he wanted to be king. Like I just it didn't feel it didn't feel like he won, he fit in with the other founder. So I'm here to learn, maybe to like. We will, we shall see. So Dr. Beyenberg. He's temperamentally stucky and he's formal, but he's absolutely not, he is absolutely in no way a monarchist. Hamilton gestures toward being a monarchist far more than Adams does. Hamilton, Adams does not request for the executive be president or the executive be appointed for life. That's a slight difference. This is true. This is true. This is true. And also I do agree with John Adams when he said the 2nd of July will be. What about Massachusetts? Yeah, so the Massachusetts one, as I alluded to last time, is it's not necessarily again, if for folks who are listening, if there's three primary sources that I would say you probably haven't read that you should go and read, it's the Declaration Resolves of the First Continental Congress to give you better understanding of the revolution. And then institutionally, the Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Constitutions. The proviso I'd put on the Massachusetts one is in some sense you don't need to read it because so much of its best features get copied into the U.S. Constitution. So you already are sort of familiar with it even if you don't, even if you don't know it. They copied and pasted. Literally, large chunks of it are copied and pasted. You know what? Plagiarism. But it's good. If it's good. Yeah, but but that's part, yeah. So

Why Massachusetts Matters So Much

2:18

the the Massachusetts, this is what why I sometimes get pricked when people say John Adams wasn't the Constitutional Convention. He's not a founder in the same way. It's like, yeah, but they were all basically saying, let's do what they did in Massachusetts. I do wonder what it was like for Franklin being there when they're all crapping on the Pennsylvania Conference. I hadn't thought of that. Do you think that he like kind of sat there and was like, you know, maybe I don't know. So wait, John Adams, where was John Adams during all of this? So well, during the US Constitution, he's off. I don't remember what I think that was the Britain deployment. I'm trying to remember which of the deployments. Because Jefferson was in France. Yeah, I think it was Britain. Okay. He just wasn't here. Yeah, he wasn't here. Uh he wasn't he barely was here when the Massachusetts Constitution was written, which is quite striking. So, because this is when he's getting deployed in the 1770s or 1779, 78, 89, 79, to go help scare up money, see your John Adams mini-series. He comes back during this brief window and they say, Guess what, John? We're writing a state constitution. Why don't you go help us with it? Sure, I guess. So he doesn't even get to see the end of it. He like literally has to bail halfway. He doesn't get he doesn't get to finish. So he writes the core first draft of it, and then they keep kicking it around back and forth, which we'll come back to. But he doesn't he gets redeployed. And he was in Great Britain. He was the minister. Yeah. Okay. So the Massachusetts Constitution now has a few examples. And they're putting it together and they they try one in 78, and the voters actually turn, they reject it. They don't like it. Which is so Adams by this point has been sort of kicking around. It's called Thoughts on Government. It's basically a pamphlet that he's sending around to friends in the Second Continental Congress, which basically says, like, here's what a good constitution looks like. And some of the state constitutions already are influencing on influenced from that. So this means Adams is actually thought of as like the guy that you talk to if you want to build a constitution in this in the 1770s and early 1780s. So unsurprisingly, when he comes back, they say, hey, why don't you actually do this in-house for us? So some features of it that are notable. The Declaration of Rights has very much of it carries over from Pennsylvania. So Madams has no stomach for the Pennsylvania Constitution structural pieces, but he thinks the Declaration of Rights provisions are pretty good. So the state's rights provision is in there. The he the free his version has freedom of speech. The convention will actually drop that. So there's no freedom of speech in the 1780 Pennsylvania Constitution except for the legislators. I don't know why they did that, but they dropped that out. The jury stuff all carries over, like all the criminal procedure stuff. He does strengthen the search and seizure provisions because one of his heroes when he was younger was James Otis. I don't know. That's a name that you probably aren't familiar with. Um Mercy Otis

Rights Protections Adams Keeps And Cuts

5:05

Warren is probably better known. She's a very strong. Sure know her. You know why? Because that is our most popular podcast episode, is on her. I think I I think she was, uh I think they were siblings, if I recall correctly. Siblings, I I think that's what they're kind of anyway. They're from the same family. There's a whole bunch of Otis's that are related and politically engaged. But Otis is his like hero when he's younger. Because Otis is, we would basically say the state, like the state attorney general now for the colony of Massachusetts. They're siblings, you're nodding. Sister, yes. Yeah. So James Otis basically gives up the position of colonial attorney general to protest the warrantless searches that are happening, the British are doing. Like gives up this very powerful and profitable position to defend what he uses sort of civil liberty, you know, home is your castle kind of thing. And Adams respects that. And so he's very so he he strengthens the Pennsylvania Declaration search and seizure provisions. So one thing that's striking about the Declaration of Rights, Adams' personal writings defend a really robust right to arms for self-defense, but the constitution actually has one of the weaker state constitutional provisions on that, which I don't know. I just maybe he assumed that they would just be interpreted the other way. Still, I don't know. But that's that's another striking feature. So no free speech, weaker right to keep bear arms. He keeps the line from the Pennsylvania Constitution and Georgia Mason on the importance of the frequent recurrence to fundamental principles, which we've talked about. I want to just actually, if you'll indulge me for reading that real quick. Because it's, I think, a striking, a striking piece of text here. A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the Constitution and constant adherence to those of piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality are necessary to preserve the advantages of liberty. So that's basically in the Pennsylvania Constitution and in Mason, except Adams adds the piety line in there. What's piety? Piety is in like obedience to God. Okay. Or piety just means obedience to reverence. But if you read the rest of the Constitution, it's clear that he has a religious context in mind. But that one comes again from Pennsylvania to Mason, who borrows it from Machiavelli. Machiavelli doesn't have the piety line, I don't think. He does not. I have the book. I have one of his books right over there. Yeah, it comes, it's from discourses on Libby originally. So he also carries on the annual elections for the governor and the legislature, for the legislature. So that also looks like it carries over from Pennsylvania. But there's a lot that's quite different. The main thing uh I said there's a governor. There's there is one in Massachusetts again, there wasn't one in Pennsylvania. Adams becomes very famous for arguing that the separation of power, like this is his thing. He's passionate about the separation of powers. Uh and he wants to have power divided. So Pennsylvania had unicameralism, just one house. He's adamant you need two houses. He's adamant you need a governor that is independently elected. Uh he's adamant that the judges uh have basically lifetime tenure and good behavior. Again, this is all in that 1776 pamphlet he writes that's circulating. Uh lots of the procedural stuff of the US Constitution in terms of like setting the rules of their proceedings, like all that kind of boring tech like boilerplate, not boilerplate,

Separation Of Powers Under The Hood

8:35

but kind of technical stuff, that's almost verbatim copied and pasted from Massachusetts. Because Adams very much has a view coming from his sort of Puritan upbringing, of sort of humans' capacity for sin and greed and whatnot. So he wants to basically build a system that recognizes that. Whereas the Pennsylvanians very much had this sort of a very optimistic view of human nature and government. No, Adams says, no, you need to have institutions to keep people in line, to keep power divided, to keep them from checking one another. And so that's a real significant difference. And that it's easy to overstate that. Well, the Declaration of Rights is the same. But all the structural stuff under the hood, Adams has almost completely reworked this. In some ways, it looks more like the British system. Or at least the British system as Adams understood it, because he thought the monarch was still more active in politics than actually was happening. Another thing that I think people often don't appreciate, the first provision of the Massachusetts Constitution, uh it sounds like kind of just sort of locky and boilerplate, but if you read carefully, there's something in there that's notable. All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and inalienable rights. Right? Now, okay, that sounds like lock or whatever. But remember that the Virginia Declaration of Rights, they said all men who enter into civil society as their sort of slavery caveat. It doesn't have that in Massachusetts, which is why a couple years after that, this is the provision that's used to strike down slavery in in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. So that's Adams' handiwork, effectively indirectly. Because Adams did not own slaves. Adams did not, no. No. He he did not quite bitterly opposed to it. So that's that's an easy thing to look over, which is like that little line from Adams is basically what sees Pennsylvania, or excuse me, Massachusetts destroyed slavery a couple years later. It has some features that against I think strike modern listeners as quite controversial, perhaps justly so. Unlike the Pennsylvania Constitution, which had relatively robust religious liberty, Massachusetts is still very much assuming that you need to have basically state support of religion in order to generate a virtuous citizenry, which will then generate the possibility of a free citizenry. So there are religious tests all over the Massachusetts Constitution. Some of these are Christian, some are Protestant, and there's oaths all over. Adams is very explicit that the one part of the Constitution that he didn't write is this the establishment of religion part. Adams actually, just as an aside here, and because it's my

State Religion And Moral Formation

11:17

tirade that you heard in the before we started here. So Adams, just like how the Declaration of Independence, there's a committee of five, there's a subcommittee of three, and then they sort of hand it over to Jefferson. Adams is basically the Jefferson of the Massachusetts Constitution. Okay. So the convention meets and they say, let's have three of you guys, let's have three of you do it. James Bowden, Samuel Adams, who just is an aside, great guy, not a terrorist, despite what the HBO show makes it out to be. And that's his cousin. That's his cousin, right. The two of them are actually very close ideologically. Whereas the show makes Really they basically always operate as a block. Like Samuel Adams, the show basically implies, for example, that Samuel resents him for getting the soldiers off. Yes. Samuel Adams is the one who requests he take the case, even though he wants him to be convicted because he wants to show the British that like civil liberty mean matters and we're going to give them an actual trial. I guess the show is not good if there's not some drama in it, even if it's made up. The show basically wants to do this thing where John Adams is the prudent moderate against John Dickinson being a wimp and Samuel Adams being a lunatic. John Dickinson isn't a wimp. He in fact enlists in the Pennsylvania militia during the revolution. It flattens both of them to be just caricatures, narratively necessary caricatures. So Samuel Adams, my favorite founder, great performance by Danny Houston. That and the fact that they have John Adams vote to break a tie, a treaty tie in this the miniseries, if you remember that. Treaties are not tight, they're not they're super majorities. So those are my two complaints with the series. Anyway, so Samuel James Bowden basically say, ah, great, well, you you can write the thing. And so John collects it and writes the bulk of it. He doesn't write the part that basically makes the Congregationalist Church a semi-established church. So everybody, the legislature, if you look at Article 3, uh has a section that effectively says the local the state can make the local governments basically tax you for a local church. Now they sort of semi-disestablish it because they say if you don't want to contribute to the majority church, you can pick a different church where tax money goes to. But you can't just say, like, never mind, I don't want to do that. Like the idea is that this and there's language all over the Massachusetts Constitution about this, most of which is John Adams's language, saying the importance of basically moral in moral training to a free citizenry. Now, Adams doesn't some historians say Adams washes his hands of this. He says he doesn't want to do it. He actually says that was the way hottest part of the Constitution that I didn't want to draft. So I let another committee do that. So it he we have no evidence that he had a problem at the core of it. There's a quote later from like one of his grandsons saying, uh, I wasn't that keen on it. But the other things is basically him saying, like, nope, just didn't want to touch that pie that piece too hot. A different committee also wrote the Harvard parts. Uh, are you familiar with the, I assume you are, the the old conservative pundit Bill Buckley, but you've heard his Harvard line, right? I have not. He says it was basically him criticizing college professors, and he says, I'd rather be governed by the first 50 names in the phone book than the Harvard faculty or something like that. Right? So this is sort of critique of the smug academics. Well, he would have liked the original Pennsylvania Massachusetts Constitution because Harvard professors were actually banned from serving in the state legislature. Why? I think because they were treated as government employees. So there's a whole section basically slobbering all over Harvard for being the greatest thing in the world and essential to Christian piety in essential to Christian piety and training and therefore it's protected. Because again, there's there's no university of Massachusetts here, right? The only universities are basically the private one, right? Same thing in Dartmouth and New Hampshire a little later. Princeton. Uh yeah, the uh the line in har about Harvard is pretty funny. But it's not John Adams' fault, but while we're making fun of Harvard, our wise and pious ancestors led the foundations of Harvard College, in which university persons of great eminence by the blessing of God have been initiated in arts and sciences and qualified for public employment in church and state. Therefore, we're going to protect all of their and good literature tends to the honor of God, the advantage of the Christian religion, and the benefit of this in the other United States. Therefore, we leave Harvard alone. It's wonderful. So I think the provision where they're banned is actually because it's listed in a bunch of government employees, like judges can't serve in the legislature. So I think that that's what the that's what the reasoning is. So that one probably also not John Adams' fault, credit, however you want to think of that. The other thing that Adams gets changed that he gets really upset about, he wants to allow the legislative the governor to have an an unqualified veto, right? So the idea that the legislative so in the Congress can override with a two-thirds vote presidential veto, he wants to have no override. Oh. So governor vetoes it's done. Oh. And they decide that's too that's too strong of a governor. So again, for for Adams, separation of powers matters a lot. Um, and again, remember the governor's veto is not policy making, it's policy blocking, right? So he's not that keen on a governor setting policy, but he wants them to be able to squash the legislature if necessary. They over the convention overrides him uh on that. Again, as I alluded to, or

The Governor Veto Power Debate

16:43

I said earlier, they take they they take out the free speech bit. But otherwise, it basically follows his draft. And this is actually something that also is, and then he gets shipped off before they can finish it off. Another thing that I think is really cool about the Massachusetts Constitution, and this is something that Madison alludes to, it gets popularly ratified. They send it out actually to the people for com like it's there's this kind of an iterative process. It gets sent out for comments, and then they send them back to the convention and they have like a second meeting, and Adams can't attend that, and they say, we like these parts, we don't like these parts. And so then they I don't remember exactly which part they end up tweaking again the second time, and then it gets sent back out to the towns to get approved. So there's you know, not like every single person is voting on it, but it has pretty it has certainly at the time, I think probably the widest buy-in, probably of any constitutional text, I think probably in world history up to that point. Because the idea is the people actually need to

Popular Ratification And Constitutional Legacy

17:44

consent to this authoritative text if they're gonna do it. And so that's something that Madison talks about in the vices. Nobody ratified the Articles of Confederation, nobody ratified most of the state constitutions. So we're gonna go state by state and have ratifying conventions for the U.S. Constitution. So that's something that again comes out of the out of Adam out of Adams's Massachusetts Constitution. That makes me wonder because my family, my dad's like direct line, lived in Massachusetts, fought in the American Revolution. So now I want to go back and see like, is there are there primary sources from the town they were from? It's also interesting. I'm reading that the Massachusetts Constitution is the oldest functioning written constitution. So could people say the US one, but I the Massachusetts one is 17, but they need to say national, but it's from 1780. Is it fair to say, because again, I'm trying to keep an open mind about John Adams. Is it fair to say then? Because our constitution, the U.S. Constitution, has influenced many constitutions throughout the world. So is it fair to say that John Adams probably had one of is the most influential founding father worldwide because of that influence? I think you can make a decent case for it. I mean, it the fact that he's sort of fallen away to be probably almost a second tier. I feel like it's as I sort of joked earlier in the last one. You know, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin, and he's sort of fallen, he's fallen down a peg. That would have been baffling to the founders. Like they thought he was the expert for I mean, he has his own miniseries. Yeah, but but even then, but if you go back and actually look at the sort of when that came out, this was wow, we're talking about John Adams again. Nobody's cared about him for decades, right? Well, and John Adams doesn't have a monument in Washington. Yeah, and we could well yes, that's that's a clumsy but sad or a coin or anything like that, right? So, but Adams absolutely would have been thought of as the person who thought most seriously about it. Again, there's other features of Adams that maybe that is Adams does believe in is sort of he gets caricatured again as sort of stuff and formal. He also gets caricatured as elitist because he is a dogged defender of property requirements to vote with the asterisk that he wants them set low. But he wants them for a very odd reason, which is he basically fears the power of the rich. And you say, well, why would he want property requirements if he fears oligarchy? Because he looks back to Rome and sees basically desperately poor people are easier for the rich to manipulate. And so the rich will actually, he says, get more powerful and be more oppressive if they can basically politically or in terms of electorally bribe desperately poor people.

Adams On Money Politics And Voting

20:33

So he wants a property requirement that's basically just set high enough that you can't basically be bought off by the rich. So it's again like, oh, this elitist jerk wanted property requirements, but for a completely different reason than you would expect, which is he fears a universe where basically like poor people in Pennsylvania could get bought off by plutocrats. And so he doesn't want that happening in Massachusetts. So it's again, it's it's it's very odd, but his thinking is not actually that alien. Now we might say his institutional technique, he wanted to do that, might be off. But to the extent people say, like, there's too much money in politics, like John Adams would agree with you. He's very hostile to sort of aggressive socialism. I mean, he wouldn't use the term then, but purely conceptual like efforts to take property away. But he's absolutely concerned about oligarchy and dominance of political of the political process by the rich. And so he defends a tool for that. Again, not necessarily a tool that we might use today, but he's not that, you know, he and you know, people complain about there's not enough, you know, why are all these scumbags in office? Well, again, we probably very few of us want an established church or a sort of state supposed sponsored church, but his argument to say, like, you actually need to have some level of moral constraint or you're gonna start electing complete, you know, amoral scumbags, amoral at best, scumbags. Again, we might disagree with his technique for it, but his diagnoses of problems that can afflict democracy, the majorities can gang up. Screw over major minorities. Rich folks can be abusive. Immoral people can basically elect immoral people and create a cascade event. These don't strike me as that alien. It's interesting because again, I know we're like coming toward the end of like our America 250, but now I'm thinking about like Alexis de Tocqueville and that argument of like I think nowadays we think about church and we think, you know, about separation of church and state and and on a lot of these things, but it when we're talking about the founders, like what Adams is arguing makes sense. Like you have to have some sort of moral compass. And it tends to be that people who belong to a church or are religious have a moral compass. Now that is not that is a generalization, obviously it's very different nowadays, but is it and Adams and Adams is not is not unique on this, right? So there is putting aside sort of the jurisprudential stuff about how we should interpret the First Amendment, which I think is like Massachusetts makes it hard to say that ever that the First Amendment is much beyond a federalism provision of like beds aren't doing this. Now this it gets complicated because then you reapply it with the 14th Amendment later, and there's a whole legal nerd history about that. But you know, when when Madison and Jefferson basically disestablish the established church, the Anglican church in Virginia, Washington loses his mind. John Marshall loses his mind because they say, look, this isn't because we want to basically force people to have our view of salvation or anything like that necessarily, but we literally fear what will happen if people do not get moral education from somewhere. And so they they fight. That's splits basically the Washington, the Virginia founders internally against each other. Because Washington wasn't particularly religious. Washington is hard to state on this. If you actually I actually was reading about this, the Mount Vernon Society folks actually argue that he was more conventionally religious than he's often credited. More conventionally Christian. He doesn't take communion, which is the major source. But some folks have gone through and looked at the timing of this to suggest that that's actually because Washington had like really insanely high moral scruples. And under Anglican doctrine, you weren't supposed to take communion if you had basically certain unresolved issues, right? So Washington is certain, I would say Washington is certainly religious. That I think is indisputable. He cites Providence all the time. Whether he's an Orthodox Christian is a dice yeah. But Washington's religious basic religiosity, I don't think, is in question. I need to ask Dr. Kareese that when we do our podcast. He'll be even more hardcore about that. I'm I'm quite confident of that. No, Washington Washington cites Providence all the time. He makes sure that the that there's chaplains at the revolution, whether he and his personal so it's I think it's easy to basically there's a there's an error that people can compress, which is like, ah, the founders were all evangelical Christians. No, that's not true. That is not true, but there's also the tendency to basically say, ah, the founders were widely irreligious. See Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen. Also not true. You know, we'll talk about Roger Sherman and others. Adams himself is somebody who definitely has a very Puritan upbringing. We have letters between him and Abigail, like fretting that if John Quincy's gonna turn pagan at Harvard. Now, he he drifts away from Orthodox Christianity's understanding of the Trinity, and some of his letters with Jefferson get a little flippant. But in 1820, he gets, when he's an old guy, he gets re-elected to the revision convention for the Massachusetts Constitution. And he does not support disestablishing the church, the congregational church. He wants it to stay. He wants to strengthen a little bit the equal protection stuff to say that, you know, for example, Jews behaving themselves well are explicitly protected under the free exercise, the equivalent of the free exercise clause. But he doesn't want to disestablish what's basically Puritan congregationalism in the 1820s either. So Adams himself is somebody who you can find a couple of his poll quotes say, oh, Adams isn't really that religious either. He's clearly is, he and John and John Quincy have sort of again ambivalent views about the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, but like they're reading the Bible fanatically and constantly praying. So it is easy to sort of overstate that from both sides, to say, I mean, the the and there's actually a lot of interesting, this is a total rabbit hole, but there is actually a lot of interesting debate about what percentage of Americans at the founding were sort of church-going Christians. And this goes we have the you know the Great Awakening here, which calling back to our last one, you know, George Whitfield's traveling around talking to Franklin and others. But Massachusetts very much is in, if not the mainstream, a common position that you need some sort of moral instruction and specifically a religious instruction. Because again, the Northwest Ordinance, which Jefferson helps write, has the language saying religion, morality. It's basically taking real religion morality necessary, so therefore we need like schools set up, which is an odd position to take in the Northwest Ordinance. And I I and again, let's go down this rabbit hole because it's fun. I mean, churches and religion were part like that was your community. Whereas like nowadays it it's a lot different because there's a lot of different definitions of community. But I think like even growing up in a small Midwestern town, like the church was the community. You either went to the Catholic church or you went to the Lutheran church. There were probably other churches, but those are the only two I could think of. But that was part of your community. So I think with with Washington, he wasn't, and maybe again, maybe I need to go back and read, but I feel like some founders are very like overtly like sharing their religion, and you can tell. And then I feel like Washington wasn't that overt about it. That's right. Yes. But he was, it's just part of who you are, so you can't like separate that. He's overt about his theism. He's he's pretty quiet about sort of his specifically doctrinal. Yes. Yeah, that's right. Yes. And that shout out to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and letting us, us, a bunch of teachers stay there for a summer institute. I got to learn all about that. See, this is why we just need to keep doing this podcast. We keep going down rabbit holes. I will say, I think I only knew Adams as like president. He's not a great president. No, but Adams, but Madison's not a great president either. He sure isn't. And I love I love James Madison, and he was not, but it's also it's an interesting thing to separate Adams as a founder than a president, and especially too as a writer of the oldest functioning constitution that essentially like completely influenced the US Constitution and then has influenced constitutions worldwide. So what I'm hearing is John Adams is not getting his dues. So hopefully in this era of America 250, he will. You never know. Amen. This is now the second podcast we've done on him because we did one

Giving John Adams His Due

29:24

on him and Abigail and their relationship. So, okay, maybe I like him a little bit more. That's all I can ask. We watch the series. Thank you, Dr. Vinberg.