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What is most interesting about the essays of the Free Republican is the fact that they anticipated at many major points the arguments of John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–1788). Adams wrote the three volumes of his Defence while serving as minister to Great Britain—a year or two after the appearance of the Free Republican in 1785–1786. In his Defence—that huge, jumbled conglomeration of political glosses on the single theme of balanced government—Adams emphasized the same inherent social division between the few and the many as Lincoln had, although he did not generally identify the few exclusively with property as emphatically as Lincoln did. But he did offer the same solution to the struggle by embodying these distinct and contending social interests into separate houses of a bicameral legislature, with the executive ideally having an unqualified negative over legislation and acting to preserve the balance between the two houses.
It is not that Adams was influenced in any way by Lincoln’s essays. Between February 1780 and June 1787 Adams was serving abroad as peace commissioner and later as minister to Great Britain, and he may never have read the Free Republican; he certainly never mentioned the essays in his correspondence. More likely the writings of both men had common sources.21
It is clear that both men greatly admired the English constitution. It was “a government,” said Lincoln, “in which
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the supreme power is balanced with great wisdom, and furnished perhaps, with as effectual checks as the imperfections of human affairs will admit.” Adams agreed. The English constitution, he wrote in the Defence, was “both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibrations, the most stupendous fabric of human invention.”22
But the English constitution that both Adams and Lincoln admired was the one interpreted by the Swiss Jean Louis De Lolme in his La Constitution de l’Angleterre, first published in French at Amsterdam in 1771. Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws (1748) had spent a good deal of time extolling the English constitution, but De Lolme’s work was the first by a Continental European devoted entirely to the subject. The first English translation appeared in 1775, and the work went on to have multiple imprints over the succeeding decades. De Lolme fundamentally revised Montesquieu’s understanding of the English constitution and helped to change the thinking of Adams, Lincoln, and many others on the nature of mixed or balanced government.23
Throughout the eighteenth century Englishmen had described their centuries-long history as essentially a struggle between the king and the people, between the prerogative powers of an encroaching Crown and the rights of the people defended by their representatives in the House of Commons. This ancient conflict between monarchy and
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democracy had been mediated by the aristocracy in the House of Lords acting as the holder of the scales in the marvelously balanced English constitution. In his Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu had accepted this conventional understanding of the English constitution and had emphasized the role of the nobility in the House of Lords in maintaining the balance between the major historic antagonists, the king and people.24 In 1776, at the moment of constitution-making in the states, this traditional view of the balance in the English constitution was one that Adams shared.
Adams had been committed to some sort of mixed or balanced government well before the Declaration of Independence. “There are only Three simple Forms of Government,” he declared in an oration delivered at Braintree in 1772, each of them undergirded by a social estate or order. When the entire ruling power was entrusted to the discretion of a single person, the government, said Adams, was called a monarchy, or the rule of one. When it was placed in the hands of “a few great, rich, wise Men,” the government was an aristocracy, or the rule of the few. And when the whole power of the society was lodged with all the people, the government was termed a democracy, or the rule of the many. Each of these simple forms of government possessed a certain quality of excellence. For monarchy, it was energy; for aristocracy, it was wisdom; and for democracy, it was virtue. But Adams knew that each one of these simple forms of government, left alone, tended to run amuck and become perverted. Only by balancing and mixing all three in the government, only through the reciprocal sharing of political power by the one, the few, and the many, could the desirable qualities
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of each be preserved and government be free. As Adams put it in 1772, “Liberty depends upon an exact Balance, a nice Counterpoise of the Powers in the state.… The best Governments in the World have been mixed.”25
Adams put these ideas into his Thoughts on Government, which became the most important pamphlet influencing the Revolutionary state constitution makers in 1776. But the balance that Adams advocated in 1776 was more in tune with Montesquieu and the conventional understanding of the English constitution than the balance he emphasized later in his Defence. In 1776 Adams was most concerned with convincing his countrymen that the legislative power in their new republican governments should never rest in one assembly. “If the legislative power is wholly in one Assembly and the executive in another, or in a single person, these two powers,” he warned, “will oppose and enervate upon each other, until the contest shall end in war, and the whole power, legislative and executive, be usurped by the strongest.” An upper house embodying the aristocracy of the society, he concluded, would mediate this contest and bring about a proper balance.26
In contrast to this conventional conception of the English constitution De Lolme emphasized that the basic struggle was between the democracy and the aristocracy with the
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crucial role in maintaining the proper balance being played by the king. This was a major innovation in thinking about the English constitution. A strong executive, said De Lolme, was the best check against the ambitions of the aristocracy, which always posed the greater threat to the stability of the constitution. Too much democracy did not lead to anarchy but to oligarchy or aristocracy. Without a powerful executive the freedom and stability of the English constitution and presumably any other balanced constitution, De Lolme concluded, could not be maintained.27
Both Lincoln and Adams knew De Lolme’s book well. Lincoln quoted “an excellent writer on the English constitution” in his essays, and Adams in his Defence called it “the best defense of the political balance of three powers that was ever written.”28 The House of Commons, said Lincoln, represented personal rights of the British nation. The House of Lords composed of a body of hereditary nobility effectually represented the property of the kingdom. Thus, said Lincoln, “The lords and commons are the two scales, in equipoise.” But to prevent that “insatiable thirst for power” from destroying the balance, the constitution of England had wisely placed all executive power in the king, “whose interest it is to preserve the balance.” As long as the king was possessed of his constitutional authority neither the nobility nor the commons “ever attempted an immediate encroachment on the other.” Ultimately, wrote Lincoln as the Free Republican, “it is not Kings or Lords that constitute tyranny, nor Senate and People that constitute Liberty; but it is that distribution
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of political power, which give security to the rights of persons and those of property, which renders a government free, and the reverse of this despotic.”29
But, of course, what really interested Lincoln was not the English constitution but the constitution of his state Massachusetts, “whose form bears, in many instances, a very considerable analogy to that of England, though the tenures, by which most of the officers are held, are altogether different.”30 The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 was the most important of the Revolutionary state constitutions drafted in the aftermath of the Declaration of Independence. It influenced the revisions of many other state constitutions in the late 1780s and early 1790s, and it decisively affected the framing of the national Constitution