These letters by John and Abigail Adams describe the important political, philosophical, economic and military issues that were first and foremost in the minds of the American people around the time of independence in 1776. Abigail Adams in particular was concerned about the abolition of slavery, the rights of blacks and women, and better economic and educational opportunities for the poor. Both were strongly opposed to tyranny, despotism and aristocracy, both in Britain and among the gentry and the Loyalists at home, and thought that armed rebellion and a declaration of independence were necessary in this struggle for liberty and human rights. Like most of the common people in the North American colonies (or the United States after July 1776) they were well aware of their natural rights and determined to defend them, although Abigail was also prepared to extend these further than John. The United States was founded on the principle that all persons had the rights to life, liberty and property, which is to say that the founders of the country accepted the theories of John Locke rather than pessimistic and authoritarian ideas of Thomas Hobbes. Government did not simply exist to maintain law and order and keep the masses under control, but to preserve, defend and guarantee the rights of the people. Over time, these rights were extended to women, blacks and other minorities, who did not have them originally.
In her first letter to John Adams in March 1776, Abigail made her often quoted remarks about extending human rights to women, which Adams seemed to treat humorously, but she was quite serious about extending greater freedoms to women, the poor and blacks. She cautioned her husband that “all men would be tyrants if they could” and “that your sex is so naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute” (Power of Language 37). She thought that women were treated as the slaves and vassals of men and hoped that that new government would improve their condition. She was also eager to hear that the country had declared itself independent of Great Britain and inquired about the state of its military defenses and preparations. If reference to how the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had issued a proclamation offering freedom to any slaves who joined the British, she thought it was a trick, but was also skeptical about fighting for liberty and rights on the same side as Southern slaveholders. Her experience indicated that the “passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs”, and this was true of the British tyrants and oppressors as much as American slave owners or despotic husbands and fathers (Power of Language 36), In her letter of August 1776, she remarked that the education for the “poorer sort of children” was being neglected almost completely, and they were “left to rove the streets without school, without business, given up to all evil” (Power of Language 32). She thought that the new government of the United States should be very concerned with the education of women and young people, and noted that “with regard to the education of my own children, I find myself soon out of my depth, and destitute and deficient in every part of education” (Power of Language 33).
John Adams replied to Abigail in April 1776 that a declaration of independence was certain, and also made some observations about slavery and the rights or women and minorities that were more conservative than hers. He did agree with her that there were two classes of whites in America, and that in the South especially “the gentry are very rich and the common people very poor” (Power of Language 37). Although he disliked the aristocratic mentality of the Southern slaveholders, he also thought that “the spirit of the barons is coming down and it must submit” (Power of Language 38). Adams was a Puritan at heart and believe in republican virtue rather than a life of wealth, leisure, fancy clothes and furnishings and displays of power and privilege, which he saw so often in the Loyalists and Tories who sides with the British. At this point, he also commented sarcastically on Abigail’s demand for women’s rights, saying the children, blacks, the lower classes and Indians were all rebelling against their masters, at least according to the British government, but now women were about to join in as well. John Adams did not believe that men were tyrants to women, though, since “we dare not exert our power to its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in practice you know we are the subjects” (Power of Language 39). Indeed, he joked that if men were to give up the title of masters as it was still written into the law, they would soon be under “the despotism of the petticoat”, for they were masters in name only (Power of Language 39). John then concluded by stating again that they would eventually defeat “despotism, empire, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy”, no matter how many enemies and mercenaries the British government “stirred up” against them (Power of Language 39). Among these enemies, though, he included blacks, Indians, Canadians and Irish Catholics, as well as wealthy Loyalists and opportunists, who had all been persuaded by the British that the leaders of the American Revolution would be even more despotic and oppressive toward them.
John Locke was the social contact theorist who most influenced John Adams and the others founders of the U.S., particularly because he insisted that all human being had natural rights to life, liberty and property even in the state of nature prior to the existence of any governments. Locke had a more optimistic view of human nature than Thomas Hobbes, and along with Jean Jacques Rousseau his views prevailed in the American and French Revolutions of the 18th Century. In the Second Treatise on Government (1690), written after the overthrow of James II, Locke wrote that even in the state of nature all people were “equal and independent” and enjoyed natural rights to “life, health, liberty” and property (Locke Chapter 2). After the government was formed, they still retained their natural human rights and could overthrow it in another revolution if the rulers violated them. Other than that, they retained they freedom and liberty, and this could not be restrained by “no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact” (Locke Chapter 4). This same principle of government by the consent of the governed and equal rights for all citizens was explicitly incorporated into the Declaration Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Thomas Hobbes did not believe that natural rights even existed in the state of nature and thought that the main purpose of government was to maintain law and order. As he wrote in Leviathan (1660) he did not even care whether the type of government was a monarch, dictator or parliamentary system as long as retrained the greedy and violent nature of human beings. He was far more pessimistic about humanity than Locke or Rousseau and his ideas were never in “the mainstream of the contract tradition” (Mills 15). In his state of nature there was a war of all against all, and people were free to kill, rape and plunder at will because there was no superior force to control them. With no rules and no morality there could be no rights, but rather “every man has right to everything and consequently, no action can be unjust” (Hobbes Chapter 14). For barbarians like these, freedom meant only the power of the strong and the ruthless to dominate everyone else, but with the creation of government they all agreed to put a “restraint upon themselves” (Hobbes Chapter 17). Hobbes certainly did not believe in democracy or a society of equal rights for all, but expected that the no laws would codify “who will command and who will obey, who will be a master and who a servant” (Hobbes Chapter 14). Those who dissented from this new system or defied its authority would simply be put to death, to maintain order.
As the letters of John and Abigail Adams show, the common people of North America were very aware of their rights and always on the alert for despotism. When the Constitution was finally written, for example, a Bill of Rights was added by popular demand to specify exactly what the rights of the people were and to place express limits on the powers of the national government. From this derives all the fundamental rights of freedom of the press, religion and opinion, as well as to protest, petition and demonstrate against the government. Locke had called these natural rights but over time they came to be considered fundamental human rights that should be universally applied. Small farmers and the frontier and backcountry regions of every state strongly opposed elitist and undemocratic tendencies in America, while most “gentleman of property” in the North and South were more inclined to uphold the idea that government should be in the hands of the gentry (Main 7). White small farmers in every part of the country and were heavily influenced by radical, democratic ‘Commonwealth’ writers of the 17th and 18th Centuries like Thomas Gordon, James Harrington and John Trenchard, who distrusted wealthy elites and concentrated political and economic power. This strain of populism ran deep in American politics and culture, as expressed by “Democritus” in Massachusetts who wrote that that the rich and powerful looked “upon their inferiors as their property” (Main 10). Wealthy planters, merchants, manufacturers and commercial farmers also controlled most of the press at that time, as well as the state and local governments and the education system, and the common people were well aware of this fact.
At the same time, however, there was also a Racial Contract in America under which all nonwhites were considered naturally inferior, subject to slavery and menial labor, and denied equal citizenship rights. In 1770-90, the slave population of the U.S. grew by 50%, mostly by natural increase rather than importation of slaves from Africa, which was unlike the situation in Brazil and the West Indies (Van Cleve 103). In addition, slavery was already expanding into the western regions and soon the great cotton boom would breathe new life into an institution that was widely thought to be in decay in the 1770s and 1780s. Northern states were already moving to abolish slavery, either immediately of gradually, although it lingered in New York and New Jersey into the 1830s. Even their most openly antislavery delegates in Congress, including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, avoided any mention of using the powers of the new national government against it, which would have ended the Union before it even began (Van Cleve 109). There were even two sets of laws and judicial procedures for whites and nonwhites (Mills 23). In the U.S. and most other Western nations at the time, "duties, rights, and liberties have routinely been assigned on a racially differentiated basis” (Mill 93). All whites benefitted from this racial hierarchy, even those who otherwise had little political and economic power, since they were at least permitted to express feelings of superiority.
As the letters of John and Abigail Adams reveal, in the United States, government was founded on the social contract and other English Whig theorists rather than the authoritarian idea of Thomas Hobbes, and guarantees the same natural rights of life, liberty and property to all. Hobbes simply thought that the purpose of the state was to control the masses and maintain order, since he assumed that human nature was greedy, violent and cruel, but that was not the type of social contract on while the U.S. was founded. For the common people, these basic rights included freedom of speech and religion, the right to trial by jury, equal justice under the law, legal counsel, habeas corpus, and the protection against coerced confessions, self-incrimination, and unreasonable search and seizure. These rights were not extended to everyone in the 18th and 18th Centuries and were only gradually applied to blacks and other nonwhite minorities, just as Abigail Adams predicted in 1776. In the U.S. political and economic system, as in the society as a whole, one of the major flaws has always been unequal rights and unequal treatment under the law for blacks and other minorities, including the use of the death penalty. This is all a legacy of the past, dating back to the time of slavery and segregation, and has not changed quickly or easily.
WORKS CITED
Hobbes, Thomas (1660). Leviathan. Oregonstate.edu
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-contents.html
Locke, John (1690). Second Treatise on Government. Project Gutenberg.
www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&sqi=2&ved=0CDcQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gutenberg.org%2Ffiles%2F7370%2F7370-h%2F7370-h.htm&ei=I02PUNHIFIb88QSPuoCQBQ&usg=AFQjCNH2Y5ORetHD1MsvIWr8DxnktcQKew&sig2=O71FTMIbGaVhnbFiC9_j0Q
Main, Jackson Turner. The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788. University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.
http://books.google.com/books?id=LPbBdyxGNhQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=charles+mills+racial+contract&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9Tc5UeueJpP29gSInYCgBA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA
Power of Language; Language of Power: A Collection of Readings, 2nd Edition. Pearson Learning Solutions, 2011.
Van Cleve, George W. A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Dgp26Y2KzxUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=george+van+cleve+a+slaveholders+union&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3zo5UYPREoqY9QT_84CIAg&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA
