Certainly not by looking to the political Left. They accuse our Founders of hypocrisy or at least allege that they did not take their revolution far enough. This is old hat—the American franchisees of Jacobinism have been hurling this sort of invective since Thomas Jefferson returned from his mission to Paris. More surprising, perhaps, is that many on the Right are adopting increasingly revolutionary attitudes of their own. Some have called for “regime change” in favor of a “postliberal future,” or else declared that “conservatism is no longer enough.” Revolution (if not outright insurrection) is in the air. On both the Left and the Right, extremism is seen increasingly as a virtue and moderation as a vice. The limits of the Constitution are disparaged; politicos and theoreticians alike imagine new and more terrifying ways to deploy power against their enemies. The rage of parties does not seem to me likely to help us learn how to love our country or to justify the American Revolution. 

John Adams—America’s foremost revolutionary statesman—warned about the perils of this sort of radical political situation. In a pamphlet he wrote in 1765 during the beginnings of the Imperial Crisis, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, he urged his New England countrymen to adopt an ardent “spirit of liberty” and actively resist schemes from Parliament to destroy self-government and impose tyranny. But he also cautioned that this spirit could become little more than a “brutal rage” if left unenlightened. Adams and most of the Founders understood that revolution always poses serious dangers, and that it should always be a last resort. 

And yet they also knew that there was a time for everything under the sun. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes,” the Continental Congress admitted in the Declaration of Independence itself. “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” The question is, how can we know when we have reached such a point of abuse? In our own time, we no doubt face any number of serious injustices. But would it be lawful to throw off our government and establish a new constitution? Does America need a revolution?

Strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as a positive legal right to revolution—certainly not for citizens of the United States. Though there have been various insurrections against federal authority throughout our history, only one came close to succeeding: the Southern Rebellion of 1861–65. Even as states were seceding to join the revolutionary Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln insisted that their actions were constitutionally null and void. “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy,” he wrote in his First Inaugural Address. Lincoln’s argument rested on what Publius called throughout The Federalist the “republican principle” of majority rule. “Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism,” Lincoln told the nation. “Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.” 

Lincoln went on to describe the difference between the “constitutional right of amending” our frame of government and “revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” If our Constitution had granted states a legal right to dissolve the Union, let alone individuals an explicit legal right to wage war against federal authority, it would have simply been impracticable. How could the frame of government bind the people of the states together if every act passed under it could be merely nullified by the threat of secession? Revolutionary politics, Lincoln teaches us, is fundamentally different from constitutional politics.

But while revolution may never be strictly legal, as Lincoln acknowledged, it may be necessary in order to preserve liberty and even what we might call the “natural law.” This is certainly how the American Founders justified their break with the British Empire; the Declaration bears some of the characteristics of a legal brief, but it does not ultimately refer to a positive right granted by the British constitution. Though they had been petitioning Parliament to respect their rights “as Englishmen,” they, at last resort had to appeal to their natural rights simply as men. 

The revolutionary appeal to natural law, then, goes beyond the determined confines of conventional law—and herein the conservative perceives the great danger of revolutionary politics, the flight “to anarchy or to despotism” of which Lincoln warned. It is not altogether incorrect to identify the murky concepts of “natural rights” and even “natural law” as “glittering generalities.” The idea of a “higher law” has certainly been abused by demagogues and would-be tyrants grasping after power, and it is difficult to define with the kind of rigor that would truly satisfy a court—let alone a philosopher. And yet the appeal is so effective because the natural law is written on our very hearts; we innately know the difference between right and wrong, and we seek justice through politics for that reason.

Russell Kirk, a founder of the modern conservative movement, wrestled with the complexities of natural law throughout his scholarship. He was certain that such a thing existed and undergirded all political societies—and yet he saw the very same revolutionary dangers his heroes Adams and Lincoln did. In a late essay, “The Case for and Against Natural Law,” he wrote that we must not understand it as “a harsh code that we thrust upon other people: rather, it is an ethical knowledge, innate perhaps, but made more clearly known to us through the operation of right reason.” Citing his experiences as Mecosta Township’s justice of the peace, he noted that in the course of his normal duties he would never “repair to theories of natural law and meditate upon which of two claimants [in a property dispute] is the more worthy of judicial compassion; rather, the justice of the peace turns to statute, common law, possibly to local custom—and to the files of the recorder of deeds at the county seat.” 

The American Founders shared this sensibility, for they were statesmen and not philosophes. They (for the most part) understood that the right to revolution may be justified in the abstract by the natural law, but we cannot derive from it some absolute formula of political action. Prudence dictates such things, and prudence is a very difficult virtue to practice. Statesmanship and geometry are very different pursuits. Our Founders were educated in such a way that these virtues perhaps came easier to them than to us. But even in the debates about independence, those great men of the Continental Congress hotly disputed whether revolution was justified by their circumstances.

Throughout those debates, however, they were guided by what one delegate called “the lamp of experience”—and especially the example of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Whig consensus that dominated both sides of the Atlantic held that the deposition of James II was entirely justified; in fact, as Russell Kirk would argue in another famous essay, they considered it “a revolution not made, but prevented.” The British Whigs who overthrew the tyrant were defending the ancient constitution they inherited—a constitution which made sense of their natural rights—against innovations which would have centralized power. The American Whigs who effected our own Revolution a century later made much the same case. 

To some extent, our confusion about the legitimacy of revolution might be attributed to the slipperiness of the word itself. In the aftermath of the Jacobin Republic’s bloody mischief and the tragedy of twentieth-century totalitarianism, “revolution” denotes something profoundly radical: the utter destruction of social order. But for the advocates and inheritors of the Glorious Revolution, the term meant a return to what Dr. Kirk often called “the old moral order.” Unlike their would-be imitators among the French, most of the Founders did not become drunk with the notion that they had “it in their power to begin the world over again. They saw their republican revolution as a restoration of civilizational continuity, not a rupture.

Edmund Burke—the greatest counter-revolutionary mind of the eighteenth century—happened to be a true friend of the American Revolution. Not only did he advocate for conciliation with the colonies and concessions to their grievances, but he also, on rare occasions, praised the constitutions framed by the independent states after their victory. Burke understood the fundamentally tyrannical nature of imperial policy and even warned Parliament throughout his writings and speeches on American affairs that they were accumulating a power tending toward absolutism. The very issues at stake in the Glorious Revolution were at stake in the imperial crisis, although they concerned different branches of the British government.

Yet Burke was insistent that these legitimate revolutions could not be treated as normative. For one, both revolutions ultimately achieved the decentralization of power, whereas the ideological movements that have plagued our weary world since his day have sought to concentrate it. For another, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke pointed out the ways that the revolutionaries of 1688 (and we might also say of 1776) did not seek to “dissolve the whole fabric” but rather “regenerat[e] the deficient part of the constitution through the parts which were not impaired.” “The Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties,” he concluded, “and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.”

Burke was disgusted by Jacobinism’s lust for power and innovation, and the same mentality still defines ideologues. Speculation and theory are simple solutions to complex problems, and hasty revolutions motivated by them are “unforced choice[s]” and an “election of evil,” according to the Irishman. Jacobins—what Burke may have called unlawful revolutionaries—are “intoxicated with admiration at their own wisdom and ability” and practitioners of a false philosophy. Their revolutions are unlimited and perpetual, always seeking to centralize power in the hands of a tyrant or group of tyrants who try to remake society according to their whims. 

Lawful revolutionaries, by contrast, offer something far more attractive than revolutionary rage: the restoration of the old moral order. In his aforementioned 1765 pamphlet, John Adams proposed this might be achieved through the uniquely American solution of education. “Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write,” he wrote. Adams cited the great thinkers and statesmen who secured English liberties, including those who conducted the Glorious Revolution, as examples for New England to imitate. “The prospect now before us in America, ought in the same manner to engage the attention of every man of learning, to matters of power and of right,” he wrote, “that we may be neither led nor driven blindfolded to irretrievable destruction.” Adams and the other Founders believed that a revolution could only be “lawful” insofar as it was the product not of heated passion, but “reflection and choice.” In this sense, lawful revolutions are limited; they aim, in the end, at restoring the conditions necessary for constitutional politics by dethroning power. 

Today, the conservative movement—and the whole country—faces a choice between a constitutional politics established by our Founders’ lawful revolution and an unlawful revolution against the old moral order. On both sides of the aisle, ideological speculators and populist politicians clamor for more and more power. It is incumbent upon us, as heirs of the American Founding, to reject the temptations of this revolutionary moment. Prudence may indeed dictate decisive political action, the abandonment of defunct orthodoxies, and the replacement of a feckless elite. Statesmanship, though difficult, is always needful. But subverting the constitution and casting the nation into anarchy, despotism, and the other woes of revolution will not restore the old moral order, let alone the rule of law. 

In 1813, John Adams lamented to a correspondent, “that the true history of the American Revolution is lost forever.” Just a generation after the Founding, the people were losing sight of the principles he and so many others fought to uphold. And yet, the symbols of the Founding were always a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. As Adams himself wrote just two years later to Jefferson, the real “Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” In his own time, the Massachusetts man was able to rouse the people against the threat of tyranny and provide “new guards for their future security” by writing and debating in favor of liberty.

Likewise, social and political renewal today will be the product of civic and liberal education that can remind our fellow citizens of who we are and who we can be. Rather than overthrowing our constitutional order for the false promises of power, we must rediscover the deepest meaning of our Founding. Doing so is, to my mind, the only revolution that we might call “lawful”—indeed the only revolution worth effecting.

This essay was adapted from remarks delivered at the Philadelphia Society’s spring 2026 conference.

The post Can a Revolution Be Lawful? appeared first on Law & Liberty.

In 1852, Lajos Kossuth, the most famous Hungarian in the world, made his way to the shores of North America. Three years earlier, Kossuth earned a reputation as a freedom fighter during the series of revolutions that shook Europe in 1848 and 1849. Most were driven by liberalism and nationalism. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the latter was usually seen as an expression of the former. Some movements included democratic elements, but all of them sought to reduce the power of or overthrow autocratic monarchies that ruled Mitteleuropa.

The massive revolution that rocked Vienna and led to the dismissal of Prince Klemens von Metternich convinced the Habsburg imperial family to flee to a fortress in what is now Czechia. The German statesman, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire, had in 1815 helped organize the Congress system that kept Europe from general wars at the expense of representative government on the continent. Europe would—Metternich hoped—stay peaceful and autocratic. The voices of liberal nationalists were systematically squashed, until they finally exploded in 1848–49.

The revolution in Vienna spread to other parts of the Habsburg-ruled Austrian Empire, including Hungary. Lajos Kossuth and others advocated for a constitution and were even willing to accept a Habsburg monarch, provided that their sovereign rule in accordance with a written fundamental law. Unwilling to allow any measure of Hungarian sovereignty or devolution and aware that the Austrian Empire was in danger of politically collapsing, the new teenage emperor, Francis Joseph, enlisted the help of Tsar Nicholas I, who sent a fighting force of over 250,000 to pacify Hungary and protect the Habsburg throne. Kossuth fled and escaped execution; many other Hungarians did not. In Britain and in America, he was celebrated for the rest of his life as a freedom fighter. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New-York Tribune, said that “among the orators, patriots, statesmen, exiles,” Kossuth had no superior, “living or dead.”

Americans celebrated Hungarian freedom-fighting, but stopped short of thinking that Americans needed to do Hungary’s freedom-fighting; that was a job left to Hungarians themselves. Walt Whitman wrote of the elderly Kossuth, living in exile in Turin. “There is Kossuth, too—living still—nearly 90! I knew Kossuth—talked with him on several occasions. He still lives, as bright intellectually—the same fine noble soul as ever. When I saw him he was a small man, eloquent to a great height—vivacious.”

Whitman, adoring as he was of Kossuth, believed the Hungarian revolutionary “made a great mistake” after his visit to the United States. “He had been almost importuned to come here by officials, by Congress, was brought in an American man-of-war. At that time any one of the nations—Germany, Austria, France, Russia—would have killed him—hung him—if they could have got him in their hands.” Those facts alone garnered American sympathy, because Americans hated above all autocrats denying self-determination. Kossuth’s great mistake, Whitman nonetheless argued, was that “after [he] got here was to make an effort to have America range herself in his cause. We all recognized it at once as deplorable. We could not have done it then, could not do it now, ought never to do it. Yet he went up and down through our states, pleading for it.”  Whitman, ever devoted to America’s splendid isolation, was “even opposed to Congress petitioning the Czar to investigate Siberia—even that is out of our province.”

American literary men, perhaps more than American politicians, managed to preserve a statesmanlike sympathy for representative government, a republican distaste for autocracy, and a prudential reserve for how freely to emote about seemingly sympathetic liberal democratic revolutionaries. In his 1851 novel The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne poured cold water on the enthusiasm young members of the Democratic party had for the “Young America” movement, committed to a worldwide revolution of enlightenment democracy. Like any young American republican devoted to the seemingly transcendent cause of liberty, Hawthorne’s semi-autobiographical character Miles Coverdale sees the Hungarian cause as worthy: “If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the battle-field of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brace rush upon the levelled bayonets.” But further than that, Coverdale was “loth to pledge himself.”

Catherine Jones, a literature professor at the University of Aberdeen, notes that Hawthorne’s approach exhibited a sort of duality that rested in the American soul regarding the international march for democracy. It was certainly right to sympathize with the Hungarians’ plight, but it was, said Hawthorne, not right to be mindlessly enthusiastic about such a cause. There was, he worried, “something foolish” in the “hyperbolic praise” heaped upon Kossuth.

Hawthorne’s brooding and cautious approach to the march of international democracy was increasingly out of step with his own party. Stephen Douglas and Franklin Pierce both appealed to the notion that America was a young, virile, and strong country destined to use its imposing brawn to create worldwide democracy. That the Young America movement was revolutionary was a given; the extent of how revolutionary it was horrified conservatives like Hawthorne. John O’Sullivan, a Democratic Party operative and journalist, said, “All history is to be re-written; political science and the whole scope of all moral truth have to be considered and illustrated in the light of the democratic principle. All old subjects of thought and all new questions arising, connected more or less directly with human existence, have to be taken up again and re-examined.”

O’Sullivan’s vision of worldwide democracy found its fulfillment decades later in the statecraft of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, like his Young America predecessors, wanted to create a democratic Europe, and the wartime president assumed that he could manage American sympathies in such a way as to turn his countrymen’s affections towards the true lovers of freedom in the aftermath of World War I. The “true spirit of modern democracy,” Wilson believed, rested in Russia, and he thought that he alone could manage what was quickly becoming a series of ever more violent and dangerous revolutions.

Hawthorne and Whitman, more than antebellum Democratic statesmen or Woodrow Wilson, obeyed the commandments of Washington in his famed Farewell Address. Written with the assistance of Alexander Hamilton, Washington warned against “permanent inveterate antipathies against particular nations” and also against “passionate attachments” for others. Hatred of a given country enslaved American interests to an impassioned and unthinking reactionary policy. Impassioned sympathy for a country would produce “a variety of evils.” What might appear to the Wilsonian or to the Young America revolutionary as a sort of Hawthorne-esque antipathy was in fact nothing more than the good counsel of the Father of the Country, consistently applied to world events and foreign politics.

Given the prominence of the themes of liberty and autocracy at play in Western politics in 2026, it’s not surprising that Americans renewed their long-time interest in Hungarian politics. In the recent election, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party was roundly defeated by Péter Magyar and the Tizsa Party. Tizsa is an acronym for what translates into English as Respect and Freedom, and Tizsa earned the votes of the majority of Hungarians because it respected at least one long-time tradition in Hungarian politics: don’t seem too cozy with the autocratic rule of Russia. In 1849 and then again during the Cold War, Russian troops invaded Hungary to maintain autocratic rule. In 1956, Hungarian freedom fighters gave their lives to pull apart the iron curtain and taste freedom; Russian soldiers crushed the Hungarian Uprising in November 1956, killing thousands; a quarter of a million Hungarians fled their native land, and many of those exiled died heartbroken in foreign countries, weeping for their native land.

Americans understandably, and rightly, sympathize with the flourishing of healthy ordered liberty in Central Europe. And why shouldn’t we? Americans hate autocrats. But likewise, there’s no specific reason for Americans to obsessively believe that Péter Magyar is a savior of Europe or a friend of America simply because he’s understandably committed to keeping Russian influence and corruption out of Hungary. Washington and Hawthorne give Americans permission to praise good government in Europe, but also to go about our days without thinking too much more about it. There is something, Hawthorne might tell us, intrinsically foolish about Americans hyperbolically praising Hungarian democrats or Russian autocrats.

The post Liberty in Hungary? appeared first on Law & Liberty.

But this framing, so often viewed as self-evident, rests on claims that are highly contestable. Locke’s case is not religiously neutral. His argument becomes far less persuasive once we interrogate his assumptions. Religious freedom is good, but Lockean toleration is too fragile to sustain it.

Locke’s argument depends on a sharp division between the civil and the spiritual. The magistrate, he says, is concerned only with outward goods: life, liberty, property. Religion, by contrast, concerns inward belief and the salvation of the soul. Because belief cannot be forced, and because the state has no power over salvation, coercion in religion is both ineffective and illegitimate.

The argument is neat, forceful, and compelling on its surface. But it sidesteps rather than engages the thorny issues surrounding religious freedom.

Of course, coercion cannot produce genuine faith. This is obvious and had been recognized long before Locke. The deeper issue is that Locke quietly redefines both religion and politics to make his conclusion seem inevitable. Religion becomes primarily inward, a matter of private conviction. The Church becomes something akin to a club, a mere gathering of like-minded individuals. Politics, meanwhile, is reduced to the management of external order.

Locke defines the Church as “a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord,” thereby sidelining any claim to sacramental or hierarchical authority. Structured worship is treated as irrelevant for the soul and salvation. This flattening of liturgy and sacrament pits inward belief against visible, corporate worship. And when Locke turns to the limits of toleration, the confessional boundaries become unmistakable: “That church can have no right to be tolerated … which is constituted upon such a bottom, that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince.” The target here is Roman Catholicism, excluded not for principled reasons but due to theological suspicion and political fear.

Locke breaks from the way Christian thinkers had treated these topics for centuries. In the classical Christian tradition, religion is not merely inward belief. It is a lived, embodied reality: sacramental, hierarchical, liturgical, and communal. And while politics should protect rights and prevent harms, it also has a pedagogical function. Law shapes habits, forms character, and directs human beings toward the good. The idea that civil authority might have a role in promoting human flourishing was taken for granted.

Locke does not so much refute this tradition as ignore it. He argues against the idea that the state can compel the salvation of souls—a position no serious thinker ever held—while leaving largely unaddressed the more sophisticated claim that political authority and religious truth might be ordered toward a common end. When he does offer better reasons for restraining the state, for example by appealing to epistemic humility and the dangers of abuse, he covertly switches from principled to prudential arguments.

This leaves Locke’s case in an unstable position. His principled argument depends on contentious assumptions about the nature of religion and politics. His more persuasive arguments are about tendencies and likelihoods. The result is not a bulwark for religious freedom but a contingent framework shaped by the religious anxieties of seventeenth-century England.

Religious liberty deserves a better defense. We can find it by looking centuries earlier in Christian history.

More than a millennium before Locke, Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (ca. 250 – ca. 325 AD) had already articulated a clearer and more coherent rejection of religious coercion. Writing in the early fourth century, during the final phase of Roman persecution and on the cusp of Christianity’s legalization, Lactantius was a rhetorician steeped in classical philosophy. With the support of Emperor Diocletian, he became a professor of rhetoric in Nicomedia, which also facilitated his entrance into the orbit of the imperial elite. We do not know precisely when Lactantius became a Christian, but his conversion almost certainly preceded Diocletian’s persecution of the Church. His career suffered as a result. Saint Jerome, who later praised his literary abilities, attests that Lactantius lived in poverty for years. However, his fortunes reversed when he came to the attention of Constantine, who appointed Lactantius as tutor to his son Crispus. He likely enjoyed imperial favor until the end of his life.

Lactantius’s major work, Divine Institutes, is a bold defense of Christian truth addressed to the Roman elite. He likely began writing it after losing his teaching post in Nicomedia. Although it does not reveal deep knowledge of Holy Scripture or particularly original theology, Divine Institutes was regarded by later Christian writers as a masterwork of Latin style. More importantly, it reveals a broad familiarity with Christian apologetics up to the point of Lactantius in history. What matters for us specifically is his argument for religious freedom. Lactantius is widely regarded as having developed the first principled argument for liberty in matters of conscience. Given his later associations with Constantine, it is likely these ideas influenced the climate of opinion leading up to the Edict of Milan (313), which established toleration for Christianity. Ultimately, Lactantius’s condemnation of coercion in Divine Institutes is both more striking and philosophically serious than Locke’s.

Lactantius argues that coercion is inherently opposed to the nature of religion and to the dignity of the human person. “Religion cannot be imposed by force; the matter must be carried on by words rather than by blows.” But he goes even further. Coercion is not merely ineffective; it is irrational and degrading. “For religion is to be defended, not by putting to death, but by dying; not by cruelty, but by patient endurance; not by guilt, but by good faith.”

Here Lactantius draws a sharp contrast between two fundamentally different modes of engagement. Violence belongs to the realm of brute compulsion, whereas religion belongs to the realm of reasoned assent. As he puts it, “nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion,” and therefore it cannot be forced upon anyone.

This is where a doctrine of human dignity begins to emerge. Lactantius does not use later theological language about the imago Dei, but the logic is unmistakable. Human beings are the kind of creatures who must be addressed through reasons, not coerced through fear. To attempt to produce worship by force is to treat persons as less than rational agents—as inert instruments rather than participants in divine truth.

Lactantius does not need to reduce religion to inward belief or politics to the protection of external goods to make his case. He preserves the public reality of religious truth while insisting that it must be embraced freely. Coercion is wrong because faith is too deeply entwined with rational freedom to be compelled.

Crucially, Lactantius is no relativist. He writes as a convinced Christian who is eager to defend his faith in public. There is no privatization or interiorization of religion here. Rather, his case for liberty follows from the kind of beings humans are: creatures capable of freely responding to truth.

The distinction between forcing belief and acknowledging religious truth is crucial. It allows us to reject compelled conversion and practice without embracing the false idea that religion must be entirely privatized. This provides a far more robust foundation for religious freedom.

On this view, coercion in matters of religion is wrong not because the state lacks authority over an essentially private domain, but because it violates human dignity. To compel religious practice is to trample upon the freedom that makes genuine faith possible.

Yet religious truth still has an important place in public life. A society may still be shaped by its religious inheritance, its moral vision, and its understanding of the human good. Political institutions and norms always reflect deeper convictions about what is true and what is worthy of pursuit. The United States, for example, has long been influenced by Christian moral assumptions and a widely shared sense of Providential purpose, even while rejecting formal religious establishment.

This settlement is much closer to Lactantius than to Locke. It affirms that religion must be free because it is too important to be coerced. It allows religious truth to inform public life, while rejecting the use of force to produce false religious conformity. And it reflects a richer conception of human flourishing than we can find in Locke’s unsatisfying dichotomies.

Locke is often credited with discovering, or at least popularizing, the case for religious freedom. In reality, he inherits deeper insights, articulated by thinkers like Lactantius, and reframes them within a set of assumptions that ultimately weaken them. Lactantius’s proto-dignitarian argument is more compelling than Locke’s voluntaristic one. His ideas have a deep foundation in Christian intellectual history and can, even now, serve as a branching point to recover a rich conception of religious freedom, grounded in the nature of the human person. We should return to this earlier understanding rather than draw from Locke’s dry well.

The post Religious Freedom Before Locke appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Adams continued that several persons “through the Continent” were saying that he had written the bold tract. “But altho I could not have written any Thing in so manly and striking a style, I flatter myself I should have made a more respectable Figure as an Architect, if I had undertaken such a Work” he wrote. “This Writer seems to have very inadequate Ideas of what is proper and necessary to be done, in order to form Constitutions for single Colonies, as well as a great Model of Union for the whole.”

Just over a month later, Adams’s short pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, also published anonymously, appeared in Philadelphia. Its succinct argument, the briefest and one of the most effective that Adams ever wrote, has sometimes been regarded as a reply to the shortcomings he saw in Paine’s understanding of constitutional government. But Adams’s intentions in writing this piece had almost nothing to do with Common Sense.

Thoughts on Government was the product of over a decade of reading, pondering, public speaking, and occasionally writing for publication, nearly always anonymously, in both the European and British republican traditions, an intellectual legacy that Adams freely acknowledged in his essay. It was also the termination of nearly a year of impassioned oral arguments, in committees and on the floor of Congress, in favor of written constitutions that could enable British North America’s rebelling colonies to govern themselves as nearly autonomous republics, and to unite in a union with sufficient strength to separate from the powerful British Empire. Yet despite Adams’s exceptional intellectual preparation for this pamphlet, he never intended to publish Thoughts on Government. The work grew out of a sequence of private letters written for his congressional colleagues, one of whom decided, without Adams’s knowledge, to send it to the printer. It was advertised for sale on April 22, 1776.

John Adams first confronted the problem of reforming a provincial government to face the challenge of conducting an armed rebellion against the British Empire, while also delivering law and order recognized as legitimate by the public, when his own province sought formal approval from the Second Continental Congress for its de facto government in May 1775. He participated in the ensuing debate, but soon accepted the decision of Congress to recommend the least alteration in Massachusetts’s government that would be effective in a province that was in armed rebellion: a fresh election of its provincial assembly, the selection of a new governor’s council by the assembly, and a declaration that the governor’s chair was vacant (although General Gage had not gone anywhere) thereby allowing the council to perform all necessary executive actions, and to open the courts for the first time since the spring of 1774. This revival of the provincial Charter of 1691 went into effect in July 1775, and remained Massachusetts’s framework of government until 1780, when it was replaced by a new constitution—written largely by John Adams.

In the summer and fall of 1775, the disintegration of imperial authority that had begun in Massachusetts the year before now spread north, south, and west, to every colony, and their governors soon fled to the safety of nearby Royal Navy vessels, or to colonies still under the control of the Crown. Adams, after a brief visit back home, faced this new challenge soon after his return to Congress.

In October 1775, New Hampshire, whose governor bolted the previous spring, sought Congress’s advice on setting up a new government. This sparked a spirited debate over the need and the propriety for the delegates to recommend any government to a colony that was not yet, unlike Massachusetts, in armed conflict with Britain. John Adams immediately took the floor, insisted that Congress must respond, and made several suggestions on the form a new government might take. His colleagues finally agreed to act, and on November 3, Congress encouraged New Hampshire to “establish such a form of Government, as in their Judgment will best produce the happiness of the People, and most effectually secure Peace and good Order in the Province, during the Continuance of the present dispute between Great Britain and the Colonies.”

Adams was not happy with such a bland reply, which Congress repeated the next day, in nearly identical language, to a similar request from South Carolina. But he was pleased that Congress had replied at all, and on one other point he was relieved. When the debate began, he feared that the delegates, nearly all hostile to the powers of royal governors that their colonies had endured for a century or more, would insist on a plural executive—a small council—in any new governments. Worse yet, some congressmen, he believed, would favor unicameral legislatures and deny their councils any legislative powers. Such unbalanced political forces, he believed, Congress had avoided endorsing by sending New Hampshire and South Carolina replies that encouraged them to devise new governments, without specifying any particular form of government.

And almost immediately, one of his closest congressional allies, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, asked Adams to summarize the features that he believed would make a good provincial government. Adams replied on November 15, with a two-page letter that listed most of the points he would develop five months later in Thoughts on Government. But in 1775, Adams’s ideal frame of government was far short of what he would propose the following spring. In several details, his letter betrayed the thought of a man who, while already warming to the idea of full independence for the American colonies, still felt ties to the British Empire. He called his proposed lower legislative chamber a “House of Commons”, and said his governor, elected jointly by his bicameral legislature, could be chosen “annually, triennially, or Septennially”—the maximum term of Britain’s unreformed House of Commons. Finally, he avoided the opportunity to label his new provincial governments “republics,” and made no reference to the republican political tradition, which he had briefly but boldly explored the previous winter in his Novanglus letters, and which would move to the foreground of Thoughts on Government in the spring.

There the matter stood until March, 1776, when two North Carolina congressmen who were about to return home to attend a provincial convention asked Adams for his view of a good government just as he was composing for Abigail his critique of Paine’s Common Sense. He obligingly wrote similar but distinct letters for each colleague, and when Virginia’s George Wythe heard of this, he asked for yet another letter. When Richard Henry Lee asked for a letter for himself, Adams, tiring of writing repeatedly on the same topic—although political thought was always one of his favorite subjects—replied that Lee should make a copy of his letter to Wythe. Lee, without Adams’s knowledge, sent the Wythe letter to John Dunlap, the printer to Congress, who produced Thoughts on Government.

In all these letters Adams’s intentions were very different from his modest goal in the fall of 1775. Then he wanted America’s provinces to form new governments, largely on existing colonial models, that would be strong enough to support the rebellion until they could settle their differences with Great Britain, even though he feared they would not reach a satisfactory settlement.

Since the late summer of 1775, however, Britain’s government showed no sign of even listening to the Americans’ complaints. Instead, George III had declared the thirteen colonies in a state of rebellion, and rumors soon reached Philadelphia that Britain was seeking foreign mercenaries to assist their armies in subduing the rebels. Confirmation that the ministry had contracted with German princes to hire several thousand soldiers did not reach America until early May, but Adams’s letters of March-April 1776 were already seeking a new objective. His immediate goal was to encourage the formation of new governments that could endure indefinitely, and which had as their basis a commitment to a new, international model, that of a republic. His ultimate but not very distant goal was to persuade his countrymen to leave the British Empire.

Thoughts on Government opened with two broad propositions: that history taught that the proper object of government was “the happiness of society”, and that both philosophy and religion, in all nations, agreed that “the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.” Therefore, the “noblest principles and most generous affections in our nature … have the fairest chance to support the noblest and most generous models of government.”

John Adams located such models in America’s memory, then fallen out of fashion in Britain, of the English nation that had rebelled against and eventually thrown off the Stuart despotism:

A man must be indifferent to the sneers of modern Englishmen to mention in their company the names of Sydney, Harrington, Locke, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, and Hoadley. No small fortitude is necessary to confess that one has read them. The wretched condition of this country, however, for ten or fifteen years past, has frequently reminded me of their principles and reasonings. They will convince any candid mind, that there is no good government but what is Republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so, because the very definition of a Republic, is ‘an Empire of Laws, and not of men.’

Adams then proceeded to the heart of his argument: the recommendation of a plan of government derived from three sources. The first in the order of its entry into John Adams’s mind, but hidden beneath his list of particular actions to be taken, was Massachusetts’s still-operative Charter of 1691. The second was the need for flexibility to accommodate the differing political convictions attached to differing colonial frames of government. Adams candidly acknowledged both influences in letters to close friends and political colleagues back home in Massachusetts. The third, of course, was his general appeal to the republican tradition, the conviction that men living, or aspiring to live, under a free government had both the right and the capacity to choose both constitutional provisions and broader political values from the Greek, Roman, Italian, and British writers who had espoused them across two millennia.

Most of his recommended provisions were already familiar to many of his readers, either because they already existed in royal colonies or were changes that were keenly desired by men in rebellion against British rule. His key requirements were a bicameral legislature, with the larger lower house selecting the smaller council; the joint election of a governor by all the legislators; the provision for a smaller council, drawn from the larger, to advise the governor on appointments and other executive matters; and an independent judiciary, with every judge holding his office for life, upon good behavior.

One point, however, was quite new: the conviction that all elective officers should face “rotation in office”—that is to say, term limits. This was the only advice that Adams later revisited. In 1779 he omitted rotation from his draft of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and later he flatly opposed the idea. But in sharp contrast to his advice to Richard Henry Lee in November 1775, he now thought that all elections should be annual. This, he wrote, would teach “these great men … the political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.”

After a brief itemization of a few remaining details, such as the legislature’s power of impeachment, Adams concluded his plan with a liberal provision for the public education of all young men, regardless of class, in every community in his new republic. This was essential to maintain the sound morals and civic virtue of the people. And if Americans would compare such a republic “with the regions of domination, whether Monarchical or Aristocratical”, he declared, they would “fancy” themselves “in Arcadia or Elisium.”

But Thoughts on Government had begun as a letter before Richard Henry Lee turned it into a pamphlet, and Adams gave it a personal close that united his sense of history with his vision of America’s republican future:

You and I, my dear Friend, have been sent into life, at a time when the greatest law-givers of antiquity would have wished to have lived. How few of the human race have ever enjoyed the opportunity of making an election of government more than of air, soil, or climate, for themselves and their children. When! Before the present epocha, 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?

One cannot say with certainty how many of America’s first state constitutions were directly shaped by the recommendations of this elegant and profound political tract. But the frames of government that soon appeared, and the direct connection of the recipients of Adams’s original letters with North Carolina and Virginia, suggest a strong influence. Five state constitutions framed between May and December 1776, in Virginia, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina, did take the general form that Adams advocated, while just one, Pennsylvania’s radical unicameral constitution (September 1776), violated nearly every political principle that John Adams held dear. Later constitutional creations and revisions in New York (1777), South Carolina (1778), New Hampshire (1784), and Georgia and Pennsylvania (both in 1790), produced governments closer to Adams’s vision.

Adams’s own Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, of course, closely followed his plan of 1776, but with important new clauses, both by Adams and by the constitutional convention that revised his original draft. And that document also influenced both the state constitutions that followed it and the federal constitution in 1787.

But beyond the immediate constitutional influence of Thoughts on Government, there is a certain irony. When John Adams told Abigail in March 1776 that if he had written Common Sense, he would have been a less effective polemicist but a better constitutional architect than Thomas Paine, he had no idea how soon he would contribute to both new state constitutions and to Independence. By May, he found himself at the center of Congress’s drive for the immediate creation of new constitutions that would totally suppress British authority in America. The vital importance of these constitutional foundations for separating from the British Empire made John Adams’s role in delivering the closing argument for Independence on July 1, on the floor of Congress, particularly appropriate.

The post Adams the Lawgiver appeared first on Law & Liberty.