within the scope of this volume, it has been necessary to abridge most of the selections from the debates. Where one paragraph or more has been deleted from a speech, ellipses appear at both the beginning and end of the part deleted. Editorial insertions in the text are bracketed. The editor’s footnotes are clearly designated by the use of “[Ed.].”
The editor has provided a general introduction and historical introductions to each of the conventions, chronologies, headnotes to speeches or issues, a number of analytical tables, and a selective bibliography.
The Massachusetts constitution of 1780, the last of the Revolutionary constitutions, was the first to embody the full-blown theory of constituent sovereignty. It had been framed in special convention and ratified by the people in town meetings. In this and in its provisions for an elective chief magistrate, a broadly representative legislature, and an independent judiciary, it avoided some of the paramount errors of the early constitutions. John Adams was its principal architect; and as the consummate expression of his political science, the constitution, together with its declaration of rights, represented a masterful adaptation of Massachusetts political custom and habit to Revolutionary theory, as well as an ingenious blending of “aristocratic” and “monarchical” elements into the republican fabric according to the canons of “balanced” government. In this character particularly, the constitution was the pride of the conservative men who led the Federalist Party and guided the affairs of the commonwealth through most of its history.
But the very features of the constitution they most admired were, of course, viewed as anachronisms by men who espoused a government uniformly free and republican. The latter had voiced their opposition to key provisions of the constitution in the course of its ratification. Although they were never entirely reconciled to the frame of government, it tended to vindicate itself in its working; and when the opportunity came for revision in 1795, as provided by the constitution, they let it pass. Perhaps they realized that in the political complexion of the state at that time no satisfactory reform was possible. The minority of dissenters identified their cause with the rising Republican Party. It was sometimes in power after 1800, but it lacked the strength to reform the constitution. Caught up in the heated dissension between the parties, the issue of reform could not be resolved. Only when political tempers cooled in “the era of good feelings,” shriveling the Federalist ranks and making Republicanism respectable, even in Massachusetts, was a constitutional convention decided upon.
The separation of the District of Maine and its admission to statehood furnished the suitable occasion. The change in Maine’s status called for revision of the system of representation, a subject entangled in other difficulties as well, and this problem, together with a mounting crisis in the religious life of the commonwealth, caused the legislature to place the question of a convention before the electorate in August 1820. The issue was little discussed publicly. Massachusetts then had a population of more than half a million, and the overwhelming majority of adult males could presumably qualify for the franchise. But, in practice, voting was the exception rather than the rule; on the convention issue, only 18,349 citizens cast their votes—a smaller return than usual in state elections. They favored the convention nearly 2 to 1. In October the towns elected delegates, 490 in all, in accordance with the scale of representation for the lower house of the legislature.
Massachusetts was at that time divided into fourteen counties. Suffolk (46 delegates), the wealthiest of the counties, was virtually coterminous with the burgeoning city of Boston. Essex (68 delegates) stood to the north, once a Federalist stronghold—the home ground of the notorious Essex Junto1—and still dominated by the merchants and shipmasters of Salem, Newburyport, Marblehead, and Gloucester. Just west of Boston and bordering Essex to the north lay Middlesex (60 delegates), primarily a farming area though, as in Essex, several of its peaceful towns were absorbing the first shocks of the industrial revolution. South of Boston and circling Cape Cod to Provincetown lay the counties of Norfolk (34 delegates), Plymouth (35), Bristol (40), and Barnstable (17), an old settled area, equally varied in its economic and its religious character, much of it poor and cut off from the main stream of the state’s development. The off shore islands Nantucket (6 delegates), and Martha’s Vineyard, called Dukes (2), had never recovered from the blow struck by the Revolution to the fishing and whaling industries. The county lines of Worcester (70 delegates) bounded the large east-central portion of the state, agricultural, of course, and, on the whole, conservative in politics. In the rich Connecticut River valley lay the counties of Hampshire (25 delegates), Hampden (29), and Franklin (26), dominated by the towns of Northampton and Springfield. The valley had a reputation for orthodoxy in politics as in religion, despite Shays’s Rebellion; but it also prided itself on its independence, and the “river gods” had long been at odds with Boston, State Street, and Harvard College. The county of Berkshire (32 delegates) embraced the entire western hill country. Here, if anywhere, was the center of radical discontent in Massachusetts. Yet it is risky, as the proceedings of the convention prove, to pin a political label on any of the counties or the larger geographical divisions of the state. In all of them were friends of liberal reform. They had no common program and formed no solid bloc in the convention. It was, nevertheless, true that most of the reform leadership and following came from the outlying areas, while the conservatives centered in Boston and the Essex-Middlesex-Norfolk perimeter.
On November 15 the delegates crowded the representatives’ chamber of the State House in Boston, and the convention was called to order. The new generation paid its respects to the old by choosing the venerable John Adams president. He declined. (“Old time has shaken me by the hand, and paralyzed it,” he remarked in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.) Whereupon the convention chose Isaac Parker, chief justice of the Massachusetts supreme court, and on the following day ceremoniously conducted Adams to a permanent seat at the right hand of the president. The convention speedily organized itself. The constitution was divided into ten parts, each part assigned to a select committee to consider changes and report to the convention, these reports to be individually discussed and passed upon in committee of the whole, and the convention finally deciding upon the changes proposed. Some delegates questioned this procedure. Once the constitution had been dissected by ten separate committees, who could put it together again? “It is like sending mechanics into the woods in different directions to hew down trees and fit them for a building.”2 They wished, rather, to attack the constitution as a unit. In so numerous a body such a plan might have been disastrous. The chosen line of procedure proved its efficiency; New York adopted it the next year. Expertly controlled by adept parliamentarians, most of them of conservative stripe, the convention was a model of deliberative conduct by a body of nearly five hundred men.
Counting all the men who wished fundamental changes in the constitution, the reform ranks undoubtedly numbered a majority of the convention. In James T. Austin, Henry Dearborn, Levi Lincoln, Henry Halsey Childs—Republicans to the man and sons of the first Jeffersonians in the Bay State—they had strong leaders. But the reformers were divided among themselves, disorganized, outmaneuvered, and outclassed by a small but powerful cadre of conservatives. Daniel Webster, just then coming into prominence as a statesman, and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story were their brilliant champions, ably supported by such Federalist stalwarts as Leverett Saltonstall, Josiah Quincy, and Samuel Hoar. Revering the historic frame of government and united in their determination to save it from the assaults of “radicalism,” their strategy was a defensive one—their tactics conciliatory on minor points, obstinate on major principles. It succeeded magnificently. Story summarized the result with a measure of self-congratulation:
I firmly believe that those who ultimately prevailed in the Convention, were always in a minority in number, but with a vast preponderance of talent and virtue and principle.
