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John Adams and the Constitutional History of the Medieval British Empire pp 209–245Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Empire by Consent

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Abstract

According to Adams, the colonial charters were contracts between the king and the colonists, spelling out in detail the terms of the relationship that the contracts created. The English parliament could only claim jurisdiction over the internal affairs of those colonies where its jurisdiction was recognized in the founding documents or was subsequently recognized by constitutional action. Parliament’s unilateral assertion of jurisdiction over the American colonies was a tyrannical imposition, the yoke, because legitimate English government required the consent of the governed something that the colonists had never been granted to Parliament.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 260.

  2. 2.

    Ibid., 2: 260.

  3. 3.

    Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953): 102–115.

  4. 4.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 260–261.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 2: 261.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 2: 265.

  7. 7.

    Jared R. Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 5.

  8. 8.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 261.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 2: 264.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 2: 265.

  11. 11.

    Ibid.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 2: 268.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 2: 269.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 2: 269.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 2: 270.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 2: 271.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 2: 273.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 2: 273–274. Andrew Oliver was married to a sister-in-law of Thomas Hutchinson.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 2: 274. The American Declaratory Act was virtually word for word the same as the Irish Declaratory Act (1719): see Macdonald, 316–317; Irish Historical Documents, 186.

  20. 20.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 275.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 2: 275–276. According to Historian Tim Harris, James I “threw in the towel in the face of the desertions … even within his own military.” Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685–1720 (London: Penguin, 2007), 275.

  22. 22.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 276–277. Hutchinson “began to drift to the Anglican shore” according to Carl Bridenbaugh, 331.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 2: 282.

  24. 24.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 288–293. All of these authors contributed to the debate about natural law and natural rights that was an important element of eighteenth-century political theory: see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  25. 25.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 290.

  26. 26.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 289.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 2: 290–291.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., Papers, 2: 294.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 2: 296.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 2: 298.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 2: 299.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 2: 299–300.

  33. 33.

    See Albert Beebe White, Self-Government at the King’s Command: A Study in the Beginnings of English Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1933), 124–125, 128. White pointed out that participation in the work of government could be quite time consuming and therefore the requirement to participate was not always welcomed.

  34. 34.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 300–301.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 2: 300–301. Hume 5: 292. A modern Irish historian has written: “Oliver Cromwell’s record in Ireland is still inextricably identified with massacre and expropriation.” R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (NY: Penguin 1988), 101.

  36. 36.

    Adams, 2: 232.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 2: 301.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 2: 302–303.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 2: 305.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 2: 306.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 2: 307.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 2: 307.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., 2: 309.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 2: 309.

  45. 45.

    Charter of Massachusetts (1629), The Federal and State Constitutions, ed. Francis N. Thorpe (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1909). 7 vols., 3: 1846–1860 at 1846–1847.

  46. 46.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 309.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 2: 309–310.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 2: 310–311.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 2: 310–311.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., Krishan Kumar, “Greece and Rome in the British Empire: Contrasting Models,” Journal of British Studies 51(2012), 76–101, esp. for the eighteenth century, 76–78, 81, 84–87. Greek city-states established a number of colonies around the Mediterranean as far to the west as southern Italy and Sicily and to the north along the shores of the Black Sea: see Claude Orrieux and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, A History of Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 42–66.

  51. 51.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 311. See also James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 223.

  52. 52.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 311.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 2: 312.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 2:313. Harrington, 18.

  55. 55.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 313. See also James Harrington, “The Commonwealth of Oceana,” in The Political Writings of James Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 155–359 at 324–325.

  56. 56.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 313.

  57. 57.

    James Muldoon, “Extra ecclesiam non est imperium: The Canonists and the Legitimacy of Secular Power,” Studia Gratiana 9 (1966): 553–580 at 561. It is reprinted in James Muldoon, Canon Law, the Expansion of Europe, and World Order (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 1998).

  58. 58.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 314.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 2: 314–315. It is not clear that Adams appreciated the difference between a Parliament, that is, a legislative body, and a Parlement, that is a court. In France royal edicts were registered in Parlement of Paris, the most important courts in the kingdom. By using the term Parliament for such registration of laws, he is implying legislative participation in the making of law. See Alfred Cobban, “The Parlements of France in the Eighteenth Century,” History 35 (1950): 64–80; R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1964), vol. 1, The Challenge, 42–44; Sylvia Neely, A Concise History of the French Revolution (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 5–6.

  60. 60.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 315.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 2: 315.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 2: 315.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 2: 315.

  64. 64.

    J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (Boston: Egberts Brothers, 1883), 8.

  65. 65.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 316.

  66. 66.

    “Second Charter of Virginia,” McDonald Select Charters, 11–16 at 15.

  67. 67.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 316.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 2: 317.

  69. 69.

    For the text of the Mayflower Compact: see Colonial Origins of the American Constitution, ed. Donald S. Lutz (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 31–32. On the situation at Plymouth: see Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934–1938), vol. 1, Settlements, 290–294; Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (NY. Columbia University Press, 1904), 1: 290–294. See also Donald S. Lutz, Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 7, 19, 24, 26, 31. For medieval travellers’ agreements: see Merrill Jensen and Robert L. Reynolds, “European Colonial Experience: A Plea for Comparative Studies,” Studie in onore di Gino Luzzatto, 4 vols. (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1950): 307–330, esp. 46–47. This is reprinted in The Medieval Frontiers of Christendom, eds. James Muldoon and Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008).

  70. 70.

    Andrews, The Colonial Period, 1: 290.

  71. 71.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 318.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 2: 318.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., 2: 319.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., 2: 319.

  75. 75.

    Ibid., 2: 319–320.

  76. 76.

    Turgot to Price, March 22, 1778 in Adams, Works, IV: 278–281 at 279.

  77. 77.

    Muldoon, Empire, 114.

  78. 78.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 320.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., 2: 320–321.

  80. 80.

    The distinction between the king as a person and as a legal fiction “a Body natural, and a Body politic,” is the subject of one of the most important and controversial books in the study of medieval history in the twentieth century: Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 7. The notion of the undying crown, the “Body politic,” was part of the development of the concept of sovereignty. Kantorowicz’s work has received a great deal of attention from specialists in intellectual and cultural history but, curiously, little attention from specialists in constitutional history: see Bernhard Jussen, “The King’s Two Bodies Today,” Representations 106 (2009), 102–117, at 102; see also Victoria Kahn, “Political Theology and Fiction in The King’s Two Bodies,” Representations, 106 (2009), 77–101; and her The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). There is a recent biography of Kantorowicz: Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

  81. 81.

    For example, see the description of William the Conqueror’s death: Ordericus Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, 4: 102–104.

  82. 82.

    Hume, History, 2: 1.

  83. 83.

    Adams, Papers, 321. This concept was not new. William Molyneux (1656–1698) had discussed the same point in order to distinguish Ireland, what he termed “a Compleat Kingdom,” from the North American settlements which were colonies not kingdoms. He asked rhetorically: do the English monarchs “use the Title of Kings of Virginia, New-England, or Maryland?” The obvious response was that these are colonies not kingdoms: see William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament, Stated (Dublin, 1698), 148. On Molyneux: see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). James G. O'Hara, “Molyneux, William (1656–1698),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18929, Accessed 24 March 2015].

  84. 84.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 321.

  85. 85.

    Adams, Papers, 2: 322.

  86. 86.

    Ibid., 2: 322.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., 2: 322.

  88. 88.

    Ibid., 2: 322.

  89. 89.

    Ibid., 2: 323.

  90. 90.

    Ibid., 2: 323–324.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 2: 324–325.

  92. 92.

    Ibid., 2: 326.

  93. 93.

    Ibid., 2: 326.

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Muldoon, J. (2018). Empire by Consent. In: John Adams and the Constitutional History of the Medieval British Empire. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66477-4_7

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