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🪵 The Threshold

New Hampshire wrote the first constitution assuming popular authority independent of king or Parliament

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tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships

4 min read

New Hampshire wrote the first constitution assuming popular authority independent of king or Parliament

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. — Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 41 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Judged by their words and deeds, for Americans in 1776, “independence” meant separating from the British monarchy and establishing representative governments in the American states. Simply put, in the United States, “the people” would reign and their elected representatives would rule. The grievances that American colonists previously lodged against Parliament morphed into indictments against the king. Paine’s Common Sense, the first widely read pamphlet proposing American independence, presented this revolutionary concept in January 1776. Decrying absolutist governments as “the disgrace of human nature,” Paine called for representative ones with frequent elections to ensure “their fidelity to the Public will.” In July 1776, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence embraced the idea of representative government by stating at its outset that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The new state constitutions of 1776 institutionalized this idea, and North Carolina’s captured their collective spirit in its opening words: “All political power is vested in and derived from the people only.” — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 5 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: For Adams, written constitutions shifted legal authority from crown to people — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 176; Independence in 1776 meant popular representative government replacing royal rule — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 5; Authority to declare independence derives from the people being governed. — Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 41 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

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