John Adams on the limits of British government
On 16 February 1773, Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts, replied to the House of Representative’s response to his previous statement on 6 January. In it, Hutchinson claimed that Massachusetts was subject to the Parliament of Great Britain. The representatives response, largely drafted by John Adams, came on 2 March. Ryerson, in his perceptive study of John Adams’s politics, outlines three reasons it gave to refute the Governor’s claim:
First, British dominions, including Scotland, Ireland and all overseas colonies, were and had always been distinct from the English realm unless they were explicitly united with or incorporated in it (as Scotland was in 1707). The king could grant the right of settlement in any dominion lands that had not been incorporated in that realm to any person or persons and could authorize the creation of new governments with fundamental powers in these lands. And the settlers in these dominions could express their allegiance to the person of the monarch, without acknowledging any authority of either the was or the parliament of the English realm.
Second, the British constitution comprised both specific parliamentary statues and courts decisions passed or issued to deal with particular problems — such as the Navigation Acts — and more fundamental laws and court decisions, the earliest predating England;s first Parliament, which defined both essential rights of Englishmen, and the respective powers of the king, the Parliament, and all other British political institutions. When colonial legislatures were enjoined from passing any laws “repugnant to the laws of England”, i twas these fundamental laws that deserved their greatest respect.
Third, building on Richard Hooker’s Law of Ecclesiastical Polity [imagine that], as quoted in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government [nevermind], Adams declared that all laws drew their essential authority from the consent of the governed and could not be enforced without that consent. This meant, first, that colonial legislatures could not pass any laws that impinged on their constituents’ fundamental rights — as an acknowledgement of the supreme authority of the British parliament would do — without their constituents’ explicit consent. It also meant that the British parliament could pass no valid law that impinged on the fundamental rights of the people in Britain’s colonies, who were not represented in parliament, without their express consent.
In evaluating this exchange Ryerson draws our attention to the convenient historical forgetting that each side engaged in in giving their respective replies:
Thomas Hutchinson forgot the seventeenth-century would of dominions and colonies, of the king’s contrasting roles in the realm and outside it, and of the contractual relationships, like those embodied in the colonial charters, that were regarded by their recipients, and by their recipients’ descendants, as inviolable covenants. John Adams forgot or ignored the fundamental achievement of the Glorious Revolution and its aftermath in England, the unification of the monarch and the legislature into one indivisible institution of government. The contestants were defending two different histories, one British North America, the other of Britain itself. 1
In a few shorts years Adams would abandon any attempt to locate Massachusetts’ grievances within an account of the British constitution. But as Ryerson notes the reply until then was always unlikely:
Parliament would never allow its monarch to become the sole constitutional connection between Britain and America, as every American dominion writer demanded. To do so would, in its view, have provided the king an independent revenue and independent power, the very horrors that England had struggled o overcome in 1688-1689.2
Here the issue would not be the loss of constitutional monarchy as such but the unbalancing of that constitution because the monarch ruled in independent kingdoms. In this sense political prudence demanded the correspondence of state and government even if the distinction between state and government obtained. The point being that if free government in Britain depended on controlling the monarch, it could not concede a conception of the state which permitted the monarch independent rule.
Richard Alan Ryerson, John Adams’s Republic : The One, the Few and the Many, pp. 111-112
ibid, p.126