John Adams to the People of the United States on July 4, 2008

As July 3, 2008 slides into July 4th on the East Coast, I hear fireworks in the distance. Likely, few of those setting them off appreciate what they originally symbolized.

First, I am deeply grateful to America’s military men and women for standing tall over the last two and a half centuries in the face of such fearful opposition at home and abroad. You are true heroes. May God grant those of you now serving victory in the field and a safe return the country that honors the traditions you sacrifice so much to defend. May He grant us here at home the courage, virtue and insight to win back - through civil debate and due process — the freedoms we enjoyed until such a short time ago.

John Adams is among the most profound and prolific political philosophers of America’s founding generation. If given the opportunity, I wonder what Adams might say to us “modern” Americans on our national birthday. Would he be pleased at how the Constitution has evolved since his passing on July 4, 1826?

Seeing our national tendency to trade away rule of law, due process and separation of powers in exchange for efficiency, security, or “child protection,” perhaps Adams might choose these words, quoted by David McCullough in his excellent biography, John Adams:

The preservation of liberty depends on the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved . . .

Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable . . .

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

He might also quote Thomas Jefferson who said:

In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down with the chains of the Constitution.

Knowing full well that governmental efficiency is the deadly enemy personal freedom, he might finish with the wisdom of James Madison who wrote in the Federalist No. 51:

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other — that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.

Every American child should be taught never to allow separation of powers or due process to be traded away in pursuit of “security” or “efficiency” or “child protection.” We should cling to these principles as if our lives depended on it for if we do they never shall. They are deliberately designed to make it more difficult for government to interfere with life, liberty, property and free association of the people. Government should be inefficient.

To America’s police, prosecutors, judges and juries, Adams would give stern reproof. “You are too quick to investigate and condemn. You abandon honor and truth in pursuit of people who are guilty only on the margins, if at all.”

America’s foolish fetish with “zero tolerance” — in schools, at airports, in the stock market, at the workplace, and in the courts — is fundamentally un-American. It is a brutal, Marxist philosophy that has no place in this country. And then Adams — in the ringing voice for which he was famous — would quote his stirring closing argument in defense of the British soldiers accused of murder in the 1770 Boston massacre, beginning with these paragraphs:

I am for the prisoners at the bar, and shall apologize for it only in the words of the Marquis Beccaria: ‘If I can but be the instrument of preserving one life, his blessings and tears of transport, shall be a sufficient consolation to me, for the contempt of all mankind.’ . . .

We find in the rules laid down by the greatest English judges . . . [that] we are to look upon it as more beneficial that many guilty persons should escape unpunished than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is because it is of more importance to [the] community that innocence should be protected than it is that guilt should be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world that all of them cannot be punished, and many times they happen in such a manner that it is not of much consequence to the public whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, “It is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.” And if such sentiment as this should take place in the mind of the subject there would be an end to all security whatsoever.

He would probably be gratified to see us read the first three pages of the argument by clicking on the nearby graphic.

That America still stands after nearly 250 years is both a divine miracle and a testament to the wisdom of the Founders. Yet we can do better in honoring the spirit of the Constitution.

The preservation of liberty depends on the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved . . .

Thank you, John Adams, for leaving us such a rich legacy of constitutional thought. Happy 4th! God bless America!