Quick Take: John Adams, the Lawyerly Face of the American Revolution
The man who was not Benjamin Franklin
(This is the second in a series of posts commemorating the 250 anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. The first post is here.)
One of the most remarkable things about the North American colonies is that the scarcity of European women there became a strong draw for widows and the unmarriable. London’s trail-blazing Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury, a single-page broadsheet wholly dedicated to answering anonymous readers’ questions – appearing twice a week between 1691 and 1697 – once had a very direct answer to a question posed by a reader:
“Q. A young woman growing into years wishes to know what she shall do to get her a good husband.
A. We answer briefly: go to the colonies.”1
Widows who actually traveled across the Atlantic could be expected to find a surprise or two in the colonies, pretty unique places in every sense.
For starters, the inquiring English widow would soon find out that colonial legislatures controlled the political process almost completely, given that they voted the governor his salary out of taxes which they only had the power of levying. Governors who wanted to avoid having their salary withheld quickly learned to be pliant and avoided the excessive use of their veto powers, leading to a political system that the amused polymath Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) – the son of an English immigrant – called “one of bargain and sale.”
The system extended to the judges. Even though they were appointed by the Crown or governor, they were dependent for their salaries on the legislature. In New York, the judiciary was believed to be notoriously dependent, to the point that a chief justice reportedly saw his salary sharply reduced after he gave a decision against a member of the legislature; some of these magistrates, pure political appointees, could not write and affixed their marks to warrants. When friction emerged over this state of affairs, some colonies proposed that judges be given fixed salaries, in exchange for them serving for life and not being subjected to recall by the government, which London refused to do, fearing that such judges would be fully embedded within the colonial elite2.
One effect of the system was to divide the colonial upper classes into those who buzzed around the governor and his staff – the class from which loyalists would emerge in the 1770s – and those who focused their efforts on staying on the legislature’s good graces: the future patriots, people like Franklin – who served as Chief Clerk of the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly from the late 1730s. Many of these also joined Freemason lodges facilitating their social ascent, which Franklin duly did a few years earlier.
These two strands of the colonial elite were not distinct blocs, and in many colonies they seamlessly mixed and matched for a long time. It’s only in some places – notably the large colonies of Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts, with cities big enough to allow for the separate circulation of opposing sets of arrivistes – disputes between the two strands sometimes were bitter and violent. And it’s from those colonies that future radicals like the cash-poor Boston agitator Samuel Adams (1722-1803), often associated with Freemason groups and circles3 and seen with some wariness by his wealthier cousin John Adams (1735-1826), typically arose.
Being cash-poor is not a good thing, I may add.
