2019 Volume 53 Pages 35-57
John Adams (1735–1826), the second President of United States, was a representative theorist of the British North American Colonies and is known as the American Revolution’s most famous leader. He had been the only president to not be reelected until his son, John Quincy Adams (1767–1845), the sixth president, lost to Andrew Jackson (1767–1845). Therefore, one can appropriately say that almost historians have studied why the elder Adams had been unpopularity.
In The Creation of American Republic 1776–1787 (1998), Gordon Wood memorably appraised Adams’s significance in the chapter “The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams.” He portrayed Adams as “relevant” based on his earliest writings and his role in establishing the essential forms of American Constitutionalism such as a bicameral legislature, with independent executive and judicial branches, to promote effective checks and balances. However, Wood believed that Adams’ theory of government was incapable of adapting to changes in the American society after the 1780s because his ideas had been based on the ancient concept of mixed government, therefore, his countrymen started considering him an anachronistic aristocrat, thus reflecting his “irrelevance” in American democracy.
The Three-volume A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, published from 1787 to 1788, describes Adams’ constitutional theory. This publication had been initially accepted as a supreme achievement of American enlightenment because of Adams’ early fame and reputation. Nevertheless, several scholars eventually expressed their reservations with his thinking. For example, Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814), in The Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), accused Adams of adopting corruptible European courts, therefore dismissing Republican principles. John Taylor (1753–1824), in An inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814), criticized Adams’ theory, especially its aristocratic element. These insights on John Adams were echoed by pre-Wood historians such as Edward Handler, and John R. How Jr.. However, the difference between these historians and Wood is that formers believed that John Adams changed his stance after the American Revolution, while the latter thought that Adams’ political inclination had already been different from that of his colleagues and countrymen, and that this had already been revealed in the political and social processes of the 1780s.
On the basis of previous studies, this article illustrates that Adams’ political thought in Defence and its fourth volume, Discourses on Davila(1790–1791), had taken exception to the democratization of Republicanism in the American political society after the 1780s. It also shows how Adams’ “mixed government theory” was different nature from mixed government theory in the context of medieval Europe despite his use of old-fashioned terms, and this has been reflected in the American society since the colonial age. By describing the Americanistic nature of his “mixed government theory”, this article ascertains the changing process from the early modern to the modern age of American republic.
