John Adams: Anatomizing Tyranny

John Adams, architect of the politics of independence

(Portrait by John Singleton Copley, Harvard University Portrait Collection)

By Danielle Allen

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.

Writing about the Arab Spring in the New York Times in 2013, political scientist Sheri Berman said: “Establishing a stable democracy is a two-stage process. First you get rid of the old regime; then you build a durable democratic replacement.” This comment struck me because it was presented as a given, a piece of received wisdom in the field of political science. But it seems to reflect a basic misunderstanding.

In fact, the American Founding presents quite the opposite story. The events of 1776 show that the Founders first figured out what they wanted to constitute and only then declared independence.

Consider the to-do list that John Adams wrote for himself and the Second Continental Congress in February 1776. This “Memorandum of Measures to Be Pursued in Congress” included fourteen points. The fourth of these points was: “Government to be assumed in every colony.” Only when Adams reached the second-to-last item did he write, “Declaration of Independency.” That was the order of operations.

It matters that this was John Adams’s to-do list. Adams was the architect of the politics of independence, working with Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. The work of constitution writing had begun in 1775, colony by colony, thanks to a committee on which Adams and Lee both served.

This intentional effort gained its first formal impetus when the British royal governor of New Hampshire absconded. In June 1775, with riotous men gathered outside the governor’s mansion, he abandoned post and fled on a British naval ship to Boston. The residents of New Hampshire understood themselves no longer to have a functioning government. And in fact, they didn’t. The governor controlled the whole political and civil administration. He appointed all judges, maintained the operations of the judicial system, and commissioned all officers of the militia.

In a sign of how these diverse colonies began to function together, New Hampshire wrote to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and asked what to do. At this point, the colonists were not all committed to an anti-monarchical system. On July 5, 1775, Congress had adopted and sent off to England the Olive Branch Petition, an earnest attempt at reconciliation. Through the summer and fall of that year, the men in Philadelphia waited to hear how King George III would respond. New Hampshire’s question reached Congress in October, before any word had arrived from England.

Adams and Lee were appointed to a committee of five tasked with answering New Hampshire’s question. This appointment sparked a period of frenetic activity beginning in early November 1775. Although the exact nature of the colonies’ relationship to the Crown remained unclear, on November 3 Congress approved the Adams-Lee committee’s recommendation to empower New Hampshire to write its own constitution. The measure stated that New Hampshire should aspire to form such a government as “will best produce the happiness of the people.”

CONSTITUTING COMES FIRST

News from London arrived only days later: the king had not merely rejected the Olive Branch Petition but had refused even to look at it. Adams pulled Lee into a late-night conversation to work out what form of government, what constitutional structure, the individual colonies should adopt. Adams then wrote a letter to Lee laying out the need to focus on three separate branches of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—and to balance them appropriately.

By 1776, Adams’s constitutional vision was circulating throughout the colonies. In the spring, Adams published Thoughts on Government, a formal statement of his view on how the colonies might set up new governments. Lee began distributing Adams’s pamphlet as well as his November letter, which Lee printed as a poster.

New Hampshire became the first colony to adopt a constitution, doing so in January 1776. By the time July 4 came along, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and New Jersey had written constitutions, and other colonies had made progress on theirs. Adams’s own Massachusetts had built new forms of governance intended to supplant British institutions.

In June 1776, the Continental Congress offered another sign that the constituting came before the revolution. Lee’s resolution of June 7 is best remembered for proposing that the colonies declare independence. But the Lee Resolution called for two other actions as well: to begin “forming foreign alliances” and to prepare a “plan of confederation” to be “transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.”

Several days later, Congress authorized committees to take all three steps. The colonists were tackling Adams’s to-do list from February. As a result, while drafting the Declaration, the Continental Congress also began pursuing treaties with Spain and France and, crucially, developing the Articles of Confederation. The Articles represented the first effort to establish a constitutional structure uniting the colonies. That effort would, of course, fail, leading to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

THE DECLARATION’S CONSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURE

The constitutional thinking happening in 1775 and 1776 shows up in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson was tasked with drafting the Declaration, but it is not right to call Jefferson the author of that document. Jefferson was a superb writer, without any question. But Adams contributed much of the Declaration’s intellectual architecture.

In reading the Declaration, many people look at the beautiful preamble and then jump straight to the end, where the signers explained why they were pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in defense of the Declaration. But to understand what was happening here, we must not ignore the Declaration’s list of grievances. If there were no grievances, there would be no Declaration.

A close reading of the grievances reveals that the complaints are organized in groups. One of the eighteen complaints, the long Grievance 13, amounts to a digression about the Quebec Act; many of its subparts repeat complaints that other grievances make. But taken together, the grievances touch on all the functions of government: the legislative function, the executive function responsible for tax collection and the military, and the judicial function.

The list of grievances is not, then, a jumble of complaints; it is a picture of tyranny clearly anatomized. And if we know what a tyrant is, then good government must be the opposite. Good government must involve pursuing the common good, cultivating and protecting the rule of law and the sovereignty of the people, encouraging material prosperity and growth, and providing access to justice, security, and peace for the citizens.

Suddenly, we see that the Declaration’s list of grievances not only gives us the picture of tyranny that is right on the surface. It also implicitly contains a picture of good government. It provides an outline of constitutional theory, a basis for the constitutional structure the colonists desired and had already begun building.

Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, where she directs the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Democratic Knowledge Project. Dr. Allen has written many books, including Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.