For Adams, written constitutions shifted legal authority from crown to people

Evidence

Highlighting the revolutionary nature of his proposed constitutions, Adams instructed that, under them, commissions, writs, and indictments would no longer run in the name of the king but instead in the name of the colony. A republic, he stressed, is a government “of Laws, and not of men,” or, he might say, of constitutions, not of kings. Accordingly, Adams closed his published letter with a flourish. “When!” he wrote, “had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?” Under such constitutions, and in a representative continental confederation with powers “sacredly” confined to “war, trade, disputes between Colony and Colony, the Post-Office, and the unappropriated lands of the Crown,” Adams proclaimed, the colonies “would be unconquerable by all the Monarchies of Europe.” Written republican constitutions, he believed, would both declare and ensure the independence that composed the very reason for having them. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 176

Categorization

• XREF: Adams’s vision of a central confederation confined to enumerated powers is a direct ancestor of the later Article I enumerated-powers debate. — connects to: New Hampshire wrote the first constitution assuming popular authority independent of king or Parliament