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 in 1787.
Unlike the earlier Revolutionary state constitutions, the Massachusetts constitution was formed by a special convention called solely for the task of constitution making, thereby creating what Thomas Jefferson called a constitution-making body that possessed a “power superior to that of the legislature.” Because the earlier state constitutions had been created by ordinary law-making bodies, they were, complained Jefferson, simply an “ordinance” with “no higher authority than the other ordinances of the same session.” The Massachusetts use of a special convention made the constitution something that was “unalterable by other legislatures.”31
The Massachusetts constitution also created a government
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that was very different from the governments formed by the 1776 state constitutions. It provided for a bicameral legislature with a strong senate and an independent judiciary whose members served during good behavior. It also created a strong governor who was granted some of the prerogative powers that had been stripped from the executives in the state constitutions drafted in 1776. The Massachusetts constitution gave the governor a qualified veto over legislation, the authority along with the senate to appoint judges, sheriffs, and other offices.32
Since the political thinking of Lincoln and Adams is so similar, what can account for it? Not only did they read the same books, especially De Lolme’s Constitution of England, but, more important, they shared in the conversations and debates surrounding the framing of the Massachusetts constitution in 1779–1780. Adams is rightly credited with writing the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, but that achievement could never have been the work of a single individual. There were discussions in Massachusetts that preceded Adams’s return from Europe in the summer of 1779 that helped to shape his thinking after he arrived. Since Lincoln was part of the same circle of political movers and shakers as Adams, the discussions accompanying the framing of the state’s constitution surely influenced both men. Lincoln in fact may have heard Adams talk about constitutional principles, and his essays may be in part a product of those conversations. So Adams may actually have influenced Lincoln.
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Lincoln realized that all his emphasis on “discordant interests” in the commonwealth of Massachusetts might be too easily dismissed. “With no distinction in honors or in rank, it is generally supposed, that the old idea of the few, and the many, is unfitly applied. Placed on a common level in point of honorary distinctions, a trifling difference in the distribution of property, can never in general estimation, occasion so great a diversity in views, as to endanger the safety, or peace of the community.” But such sentiments were wrong, as he had demonstrated over and over again.33
Lincoln certainly knew about discordant interests firsthand. From at least 1774 on, many farmers in the western counties of Massachusetts had been in a state of virtual rebellion. In Hampshire County the courts had been closed since 1774 and did not open until 1778; in Berkshire County the courts did not open until the Massachusetts constitution had gone into effect. Even after the formation of the new state constitution extralegal committees and conventions continued to protest the structure of the senate and the overwhelming hard-money interests of easterner creditors in the government.
Because Lincoln had spent over two years in Worcester he was well aware of the “grumbling, committeeing and conventing” of these western agitators. He told his father in the spring of 1779 that he thought the General Court’s call for a constitutional convention was because of “an uneasiness in the Counties of Berkshire and Hampshire.” By the summer he was hoping only that Massachusetts might be spared the “jars, distrust and discourse” that was convulsing the party-ridden state of Pennsylvania. Cicero had once said,
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he reminded his father, that “novelties,” like Pennsylvania’s unicameral legislature, “are dangerous things in a republic.” He repeated the Ciceronian phrase in his Free Republican essays several years later.34
The bicameral legislature of the Massachusetts constitution, said Lincoln, was designed to deal with the problem of different interests. Since “men are entitled to political power, in proportion to the rights they possess at the entering into society,” any constitution of a free government, Lincoln said, must recognize both the rights of persons and the rights of property. In the Massachusetts constitution the house of representatives represented the rights of persons and the senate represented the rights of property. Because all those who possessed the rights of property also possessed the rights of persons, it followed, wrote Lincoln, that the few possessed more political power than the many. Consequently, he said, “equality is not the principle of government,” and certainly not the principle of the government of Massachusetts. Instead, the principle of the Massachusetts constitution was “a species of honour, or a respect for that distinction, which the constitution acknowledges to exist.” In other words, because of the unequal distribution of property,
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inequality necessarily had to be the reigning principle of any free government. None of the patriots had ever been quite as blunt as Lincoln in making this point.35
By making property the criterion of the aristocracy and thus membership in the senate, the Massachusetts constitution makers had decisively altered the original meaning of mixed government. In 1776 the framers of the Revolutionary state constitutions had hoped that their upper houses would embody the wisdom and learning of the society. These senates, the term borrowed from ancient Rome, were a great deal smaller in size than the lower houses and were usually granted longer tenure of office, with staggered terms to lend stability to the mixed and balanced governments. The state senates, said Alexander Hamilton in 1777, were to be “to the commonwealth what ballast is to a ship.”36
But, as David Ramsay of South Carolina pointed out, “the mode of creating two branches” that would embody different orders of men in the society proved to be “a matter of difficulty.” Having the people select both houses of the legislature “out of a homogenous mass” of people was no solution, said Ramsay, for “this rather made two coordinate houses of representatives than a check on a single
