Читать книгу Essays by “The Free Republican,” 1784–1786 - Benjamin Lincoln Jr. - Страница 6

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INTRODUCTION

These ten essays by the “Free Republican” were written by Benjamin Lincoln, Jr., son of the Revolutionary War general, Benjamin Lincoln, from Hingham, Massachusetts.¹ Lincoln was obviously a talented young man. He was born in 1756, graduated from Harvard in 1777, and by the mid-1780s was well on his way to establishing himself publicly. After clerking for three years with two important judges, he set up his law practice in 1782 in Cambridge. He had spent thirty months in Worcester studying under Judge Levi Lincoln; later he moved to Boston to study with John Lowell, one of the key figures in the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1780 and a friend of John and Abigail Adams. At the outset of the Revolutionary War in 1775, young Lincoln had temporarily left Harvard to serve as an enlisted soldier in General John Thomas’s Regiment in Roxbury. In 1777 he spent several months in Albany as medical assistant to his father, helping him recover from a leg wound received at the battle of Saratoga. The father and son were close, and in their wartime correspondence General Lincoln had encouraged

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his son to write on political and constitutional questions, which helps account for the appearance of the young man’s Free Republican essays.²

The publication of these essays enhanced what was already a impressive public career. By 1784 not only was Lincoln a trusted member of the Massachusetts Bar practicing before the state’s court of common pleas but he had become a Freemason in a prestigious lodge. In 1785 he married Mary Otis, youngest daughter of the Revolutionary patriot, James Otis, and was moving in genteel circles with many powerful political and judicial figures, including John Lowell, Edmund Trowbridge, and other members of what the followers of Thomas Jefferson later called the “Essex Junto.” By 1787, he was corresponding regularly with Washington’s aide Tobias Lear and at least once with Washington himself.³

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But unfortunately in January 1788, just two years after the Free Republican was published, Lincoln’s promising career was cut short. He died of a sudden illness, leaving his wife Mary to raise their two infant sons. His father’s shaky finances forced the sale of Lincoln’s superb library that he had painstakingly acquired over the previous decade.⁴ With the proceeds, Mary and the children moved to Hingham to live with her in-laws, the general and his wife.⁵

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Lincoln’s first six essays of the Free Republican first appeared in seven monthly issues of the Boston Magazine throughout the year 1784.⁶ Apparently the essays were so well received and considered so important that Lincoln decided that they ought to have a wider readership. This could be done by bringing them out in the popular Boston newspaper, the Independent Chronicle. So between November 24, 1785, and February 9, 1786, the Independent Chronicle republished the first six of Lincoln’s essays and then subsequently published the four additional essays.

The publication of the Free Republican essays was indeed a significant intellectual event in Massachusetts politics. Benjamin Austin in his Observations on the Pernicious Practice of the Law (1786) immediately took on the Free Republican.

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Austin challenged the Free Republican’s contention that lawyers were a “necessary order in a republic.” Austin devoted his fifty-two-page pamphlet uncovering “the many pernicious practices in the profession of the law” in order to make a case for abolishing what he believed was anything but a necessary order; in fact, he claimed, the order of lawyers was both “useless” and “dangerous.” And more than a dozen years later the self-educated New England farmer William Manning in his “Key of Liberty” written in 1799 vividly recalled the significance of the Free Republican’s essays, even as he passionately disagreed with them.⁷

Those essays by the Free Republican, Manning said, were the “the greatest collection of historical accounts” of the “feuds and animosities, contentions and bloodsheds that happened in the ancient republics” that he had ever encountered. By setting forth the many struggles that had taken place through history “between the Few and the Many, the patricians and plebeians, rich and poor, debtor and creditor,” the writings of the Free Republican framed Manning’s own thinking about society.⁸

Manning was particularly taken with Lincoln’s essay Number V, which had drawn “the dividing line between the Few and Many as they apply to us in America.” “Two distinct and different orders of men,” the Free Republican had written,

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“seems incident to every society,” and these “two contending interests,” fed by a “spirit of jealousy and distrust,” would always be in dispute with one another. “Whether the parties to the contests style themselves the Rich and the Poor, the Great and the Small, the High and the Low, the Elders and People, Patricians and Plebeians, Nobility and Commons, still,” the Free Republican had claimed, “the source and effects of the dispute are the same.”⁹

All of the Free Republican’s descriptions of the two contending interests was fodder to Manning, who in 1799, writing as “a Laborer,” saw himself as a spokesman for the many working plebeians struggling against the aristocratic elite of Massachusetts. Borrowing straight from young Lincoln’s account of the “two general divisions” existing in all societies, which “with us … are described by the gentlemen and the common people,” Manning concluded that the struggles in America at the end of the eighteenth century had boiled down to a conflict “between those that labor for a living and those who do not.”¹⁰

This was a common division emerging out of the Revolution between common middling men who worked for a living and leisured gentry that ran through much of the polemics of the early Republic. Eventually this social conflict ended up, in the North at least, with the middling sort more or less coming to dominate the society and culture. Not only did most members of the emerging middle class of workers—commercial farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, teachers,

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editors, petty traders, and businessmen—come to claim the title of gentlemen, rendering the traditional distinction virtually meaningless, but they turned the North into a middling society that honored labor as the supreme human activity. By contrast, southern society remained frozen in the eighteenth century. The South’s leisured patrician aristocracy clung to the ancient notion that labor was mean and despicable and fit only for slaves.¹¹

Although the Harvard-educated Lincoln had had no intention of supporting the arguments of the likes of Manning, nevertheless, he set forth in graphic terms the two opposing social interests that undergirded the middling assault on the leisured aristocracy that bedeviled American politics for decades. The many, said the Free Republican, were those who possessed only the rights of persons; their “subsistence is derived from their bodily labours.” The few, on the other hand, were those who obtained “their riches and support, not from their own, but the labours of others.” These men of property, wrote Lincoln, who certainly saw himself as one of them, were “the merchant, the physician, the lawyer and the divine, and in a word, all of every kind whose subsistence is not derived from the labours of their body.” Because the few gentry derived their support from the same source, that is, the labor of others, they collaborated and supported one another. “As a union of interests is the strongest cement of friendship, we find them, not only united in publick life, but associating together in private.” Since these gentlemen possessed a sense of superiority and seldom stooped except with

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reluctance, they rarely associated with the laboring many and inevitably courted the society of their own genteel kind.¹²

Since Lincoln, a full-fledged member of the gentry elite, scarcely imagined that a middling laborer like Manning might read his essays, let alone comment on them in writing, he was more frank and candid than he otherwise might have been. His arrogant tone and his presumption that social inequality was part of “the great arrangement of nature” were infuriating to the likes of Manning. Although Lincoln admitted that labor was “the sole parent of property,” he turned that principle around to emphasize how dependent the many were on the property of the few. If the few had less wealth, he said, then “the labour necessary for the subsistence of the labourer” would be diminished. In effect, Lincoln saw the few in traditional terms as the necessary patrons of the many. “Were the rich not to be lavish,” Montesquieu had written, “the poor would starve.”¹³ The leisured few, Lincoln conceded, might at first blush even be regarded as “useless, the mere drones of the hive; but it is to be remembered that we are not to quarrel with the destination of things, but must take mankind as we find them.” It was because of the greed, maladies, and vices of the many that the few gentry flourished.¹⁴

No wonder Manning so deeply resented what he took to be the Free Republican’s brazen bias in favor of the aristocratic few. The Free Republican, he said, “tries to prove that unless the Few have weight and influence in the government

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according to their riches and high station in life, the government cannot be free; and he proposes great alterations in the constitution in order to better accommodate the interests of the Few.” Although these sentiments—“urged in such a masterly manner just before the adoption of the federal constitution”—had continued to dominate American politics through the Washington and Adams administrations, they were, in fact, wrote Manning in 1799, “directly contrary to the principles of liberty and were no doubt written to destroy it.”¹⁵

It was too bad, Manning noted, that the essays of the Free Republican were no longer in print; he wished they could be republished in 1799 so that the falseness of their arguments could be more fully exposed and refuted. At any rate, Manning himself was determined to prove that the Free Republican was wrong in thinking “that the destruction of free governments arises from the licentiousness of the Many or their representatives.” Instead, he claimed, “their destruction always arises from the unreasonable dispositions and combinations of the Few, and the ignorance and carelessness of the Many.… Finding their schemes and views of interest borne down by the Many, to gain the power they cannot constitutionally obtain, the Few,” wrote Manning, quoting the Free Republican directly, “endeavor to get it by cunning and corruption.”¹⁶

Manning was not mistaken in seeing the essays by the Free Republican as original and provocative and openly partial to the rich. They directly challenged the principle of equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the

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principle that presumably lay at the heart of the Revolution. In fact, claimed the Free Republican, given “the various dispositions of men, the diversity of their genius, their abilities, their activity and spirit, it is impossible to conceive, that an equality should long exist among them, either, as to the extent of their property or the improvement of their minds.”¹⁷

But Manning was mistaken in thinking that the Free Republican was simply defending the few against the many. On the contrary, Lincoln argued, perhaps with a good deal of disingenuousness, “our government will certainly cease to be free whenever the few deprive the many of their share in the administration of it. For it will then at once become an aristocracy.” Although Lincoln realized that the many commoners would think that most of what he had to say “favor too much the principles of aristocracy,” he wished to make clear that he feared the power of the few nearly as much as the power of the many.¹⁸ This was the kind of deceptive self-deprecating argument the gentry sometimes used to justify their own distinctiveness and their separate representation in the upper houses of the legislatures.

Lincoln showed more of his true colors by contending that “men possessed of property are entitled to a greater share in political authority than those who are destitute of it.” If this privilege were not publicly acknowledged and given institutional form, the government would never be free and long lasting. Too much “democracy” in the government would threaten the property of the few and the rich. Out of “a sense of common danger” the gentry in response were bound to come together and protect themselves. What

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they were unable to obtain constitutionally, they would try to acquire by deceit and venality. The rich few could never be kept down. “Power, or the ability of controlling others, ever has been, and ever will be attached to property.… The glare of wealth, and the splendor of its favours, will create an influence which no civil constitution can control.” To Lincoln the conclusion was obvious: “Let us therefore regulate an evil we cannot prevent.” Segregate the few in a separate house of the legislature.¹⁹

Bicameralism was the only solution. In order “to prevent the evil of usurpation on the part of either the few or the many, a due proportion of power is to be granted to each.” Since “in a free government each citizen’s share in political authority ought to be proportioned to his rights in society,” each interest should be represented in a house of a bicameral legislature and balanced against one another, with the executive acting as the preserver of the balance. “A balance,” wrote the Free Republican, “supposes three things, the two scales and the hand that holds it.” That hand was the executive, who, claimed the Free Republican, ought to possess an unqualified negative over all legislation. “Superior to influence, and independent of expecting parties, he should throw his weight into either scale indifferently, as the one or the other shall preponderate.”²⁰

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What is most interesting about the essays of the Free Republican is the fact that they anticipated at many major points the arguments of John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–1788). Adams wrote the three volumes of his Defence while serving as minister to Great Britain—a year or two after the appearance of the Free Republican in 1785–1786. In his Defence—that huge, jumbled conglomeration of political glosses on the single theme of balanced government—Adams emphasized the same inherent social division between the few and the many as Lincoln had, although he did not generally identify the few exclusively with property as emphatically as Lincoln did. But he did offer the same solution to the struggle by embodying these distinct and contending social interests into separate houses of a bicameral legislature, with the executive ideally having an unqualified negative over legislation and acting to preserve the balance between the two houses.

It is not that Adams was influenced in any way by Lincoln’s essays. Between February 1780 and June 1787 Adams was serving abroad as peace commissioner and later as minister to Great Britain, and he may never have read the Free Republican; he certainly never mentioned the essays in his correspondence. More likely the writings of both men had common sources.²¹

It is clear that both men greatly admired the English constitution. It was “a government,” said Lincoln, “in which

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the supreme power is balanced with great wisdom, and furnished perhaps, with as effectual checks as the imperfections of human affairs will admit.” Adams agreed. The English constitution, he wrote in the Defence, was “both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibrations, the most stupendous fabric of human invention.”²²

But the English constitution that both Adams and Lincoln admired was the one interpreted by the Swiss Jean Louis De Lolme in his La Constitution de l’Angleterre, first published in French at Amsterdam in 1771. Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws (1748) had spent a good deal of time extolling the English constitution, but De Lolme’s work was the first by a Continental European devoted entirely to the subject. The first English translation appeared in 1775, and the work went on to have multiple imprints over the succeeding decades. De Lolme fundamentally revised Montesquieu’s understanding of the English constitution and helped to change the thinking of Adams, Lincoln, and many others on the nature of mixed or balanced government.²³

Throughout the eighteenth century Englishmen had described their centuries-long history as essentially a struggle between the king and the people, between the prerogative powers of an encroaching Crown and the rights of the people defended by their representatives in the House of Commons. This ancient conflict between monarchy and

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democracy had been mediated by the aristocracy in the House of Lords acting as the holder of the scales in the marvelously balanced English constitution. In his Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu had accepted this conventional understanding of the English constitution and had emphasized the role of the nobility in the House of Lords in maintaining the balance between the major historic antagonists, the king and people.²⁴ In 1776, at the moment of constitution-making in the states, this traditional view of the balance in the English constitution was one that Adams shared.

Adams had been committed to some sort of mixed or balanced government well before the Declaration of Independence. “There are only Three simple Forms of Government,” he declared in an oration delivered at Braintree in 1772, each of them undergirded by a social estate or order. When the entire ruling power was entrusted to the discretion of a single person, the government, said Adams, was called a monarchy, or the rule of one. When it was placed in the hands of “a few great, rich, wise Men,” the government was an aristocracy, or the rule of the few. And when the whole power of the society was lodged with all the people, the government was termed a democracy, or the rule of the many. Each of these simple forms of government possessed a certain quality of excellence. For monarchy, it was energy; for aristocracy, it was wisdom; and for democracy, it was virtue. But Adams knew that each one of these simple forms of government, left alone, tended to run amuck and become perverted. Only by balancing and mixing all three in the government, only through the reciprocal sharing of political power by the one, the few, and the many, could the desirable qualities

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of each be preserved and government be free. As Adams put it in 1772, “Liberty depends upon an exact Balance, a nice Counterpoise of the Powers in the state.… The best Governments in the World have been mixed.”²⁵

Adams put these ideas into his Thoughts on Government, which became the most important pamphlet influencing the Revolutionary state constitution makers in 1776. But the balance that Adams advocated in 1776 was more in tune with Montesquieu and the conventional understanding of the English constitution than the balance he emphasized later in his Defence. In 1776 Adams was most concerned with convincing his countrymen that the legislative power in their new republican governments should never rest in one assembly. “If the legislative power is wholly in one Assembly and the executive in another, or in a single person, these two powers,” he warned, “will oppose and enervate upon each other, until the contest shall end in war, and the whole power, legislative and executive, be usurped by the strongest.” An upper house embodying the aristocracy of the society, he concluded, would mediate this contest and bring about a proper balance.²⁶

In contrast to this conventional conception of the English constitution De Lolme emphasized that the basic struggle was between the democracy and the aristocracy with the

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crucial role in maintaining the proper balance being played by the king. This was a major innovation in thinking about the English constitution. A strong executive, said De Lolme, was the best check against the ambitions of the aristocracy, which always posed the greater threat to the stability of the constitution. Too much democracy did not lead to anarchy but to oligarchy or aristocracy. Without a powerful executive the freedom and stability of the English constitution and presumably any other balanced constitution, De Lolme concluded, could not be maintained.²⁷

Both Lincoln and Adams knew De Lolme’s book well. Lincoln quoted “an excellent writer on the English constitution” in his essays, and Adams in his Defence called it “the best defense of the political balance of three powers that was ever written.”²⁸ The House of Commons, said Lincoln, represented personal rights of the British nation. The House of Lords composed of a body of hereditary nobility effectually represented the property of the kingdom. Thus, said Lincoln, “The lords and commons are the two scales, in equipoise.” But to prevent that “insatiable thirst for power” from destroying the balance, the constitution of England had wisely placed all executive power in the king, “whose interest it is to preserve the balance.” As long as the king was possessed of his constitutional authority neither the nobility nor the commons “ever attempted an immediate encroachment on the other.” Ultimately, wrote Lincoln as the Free Republican, “it is not Kings or Lords that constitute tyranny, nor Senate and People that constitute Liberty; but it is that distribution

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of political power, which give security to the rights of persons and those of property, which renders a government free, and the reverse of this despotic.”²⁹

But, of course, what really interested Lincoln was not the English constitution but the constitution of his state Massachusetts, “whose form bears, in many instances, a very considerable analogy to that of England, though the tenures, by which most of the officers are held, are altogether different.”³⁰ The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 was the most important of the Revolutionary state constitutions drafted in the aftermath of the Declaration of Independence. It influenced the revisions of many other state constitutions in the late 1780s and early 1790s, and it decisively affected the framing of the national Constitution in 1787.

Unlike the earlier Revolutionary state constitutions, the Massachusetts constitution was formed by a special convention called solely for the task of constitution making, thereby creating what Thomas Jefferson called a constitution-making body that possessed a “power superior to that of the legislature.” Because the earlier state constitutions had been created by ordinary law-making bodies, they were, complained Jefferson, simply an “ordinance” with “no higher authority than the other ordinances of the same session.” The Massachusetts use of a special convention made the constitution something that was “unalterable by other legislatures.”³¹

The Massachusetts constitution also created a government

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that was very different from the governments formed by the 1776 state constitutions. It provided for a bicameral legislature with a strong senate and an independent judiciary whose members served during good behavior. It also created a strong governor who was granted some of the prerogative powers that had been stripped from the executives in the state constitutions drafted in 1776. The Massachusetts constitution gave the governor a qualified veto over legislation, the authority along with the senate to appoint judges, sheriffs, and other offices.³²

Since the political thinking of Lincoln and Adams is so similar, what can account for it? Not only did they read the same books, especially De Lolme’s Constitution of England, but, more important, they shared in the conversations and debates surrounding the framing of the Massachusetts constitution in 1779–1780. Adams is rightly credited with writing the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, but that achievement could never have been the work of a single individual. There were discussions in Massachusetts that preceded Adams’s return from Europe in the summer of 1779 that helped to shape his thinking after he arrived. Since Lincoln was part of the same circle of political movers and shakers as Adams, the discussions accompanying the framing of the state’s constitution surely influenced both men. Lincoln in fact may have heard Adams talk about constitutional principles, and his essays may be in part a product of those conversations. So Adams may actually have influenced Lincoln.

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Lincoln realized that all his emphasis on “discordant interests” in the commonwealth of Massachusetts might be too easily dismissed. “With no distinction in honors or in rank, it is generally supposed, that the old idea of the few, and the many, is unfitly applied. Placed on a common level in point of honorary distinctions, a trifling difference in the distribution of property, can never in general estimation, occasion so great a diversity in views, as to endanger the safety, or peace of the community.” But such sentiments were wrong, as he had demonstrated over and over again.³³

Lincoln certainly knew about discordant interests firsthand. From at least 1774 on, many farmers in the western counties of Massachusetts had been in a state of virtual rebellion. In Hampshire County the courts had been closed since 1774 and did not open until 1778; in Berkshire County the courts did not open until the Massachusetts constitution had gone into effect. Even after the formation of the new state constitution extralegal committees and conventions continued to protest the structure of the senate and the overwhelming hard-money interests of easterner creditors in the government.

Because Lincoln had spent over two years in Worcester he was well aware of the “grumbling, committeeing and conventing” of these western agitators. He told his father in the spring of 1779 that he thought the General Court’s call for a constitutional convention was because of “an uneasiness in the Counties of Berkshire and Hampshire.” By the summer he was hoping only that Massachusetts might be spared the “jars, distrust and discourse” that was convulsing the party-ridden state of Pennsylvania. Cicero had once said,

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he reminded his father, that “novelties,” like Pennsylvania’s unicameral legislature, “are dangerous things in a republic.” He repeated the Ciceronian phrase in his Free Republican essays several years later.³⁴

The bicameral legislature of the Massachusetts constitution, said Lincoln, was designed to deal with the problem of different interests. Since “men are entitled to political power, in proportion to the rights they possess at the entering into society,” any constitution of a free government, Lincoln said, must recognize both the rights of persons and the rights of property. In the Massachusetts constitution the house of representatives represented the rights of persons and the senate represented the rights of property. Because all those who possessed the rights of property also possessed the rights of persons, it followed, wrote Lincoln, that the few possessed more political power than the many. Consequently, he said, “equality is not the principle of government,” and certainly not the principle of the government of Massachusetts. Instead, the principle of the Massachusetts constitution was “a species of honour, or a respect for that distinction, which the constitution acknowledges to exist.” In other words, because of the unequal distribution of property,

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inequality necessarily had to be the reigning principle of any free government. None of the patriots had ever been quite as blunt as Lincoln in making this point.³⁵

By making property the criterion of the aristocracy and thus membership in the senate, the Massachusetts constitution makers had decisively altered the original meaning of mixed government. In 1776 the framers of the Revolutionary state constitutions had hoped that their upper houses would embody the wisdom and learning of the society. These senates, the term borrowed from ancient Rome, were a great deal smaller in size than the lower houses and were usually granted longer tenure of office, with staggered terms to lend stability to the mixed and balanced governments. The state senates, said Alexander Hamilton in 1777, were to be “to the commonwealth what ballast is to a ship.”³⁶

But, as David Ramsay of South Carolina pointed out, “the mode of creating two branches” that would embody different orders of men in the society proved to be “a matter of difficulty.” Having the people select both houses of the legislature “out of a homogenous mass” of people was no solution, said Ramsay, for “this rather made two coordinate houses of representatives than a check on a single one, by the moderation of a select few.”³⁷

The framers in each state in 1776 sought different solutions to the problem. Nearly all provided for special property

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qualifications for senatorial candidates that exceeded those for candidate for the lower houses. Two states required the senatorial electorate to have more property than electors of the representatives in the lower houses, a means of distinction that James Madison believed superior to attaching property qualifications to the candidates. But the problem persisted, especially in Virginia, which had made no distinction whatsoever between the senatorial and lower house electors and candidates. The two houses of the Virginia legislature, complained Charles Lee, actually “consists of only one, for from the constitution of the Senate (as it is ridiculously called) they must be made up of the self-same clay.”³⁸

Everywhere American leaders wrung their hands over their inability to distinguish their senates from their houses of representatives. One solution to the problem lay in the special qualifications that most framers had provided for members of the upper houses, and it was soon exploited. Senators, William Hooper of North Carolina had said in 1776, should be “selected for their Wisdom, remarkable Integrity, or that Weight which arises from property and gives Independence and Impartiality to the human mind.” Although wisdom and integrity were difficult to measure, property was not. And in property many American leaders saw a criterion by which the “senatorial part” of their society could be distinguished from ordinary people.³⁹

Of course, the property that the elite invoked was not

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modern capitalistic property; it was rather static proprietary wealth—land, bonds, rents, money out on loan—the kind of property that was the source of the gentry’s independence.⁴⁰ That independence, as Josiah Quincy pointed out, really meant independence from “the fickleness and inconstancy” of the marketplace and from the vagaries of paper money and inflation. For gentlemen like Quincy, Lincoln, and Adams, paper money and modern venture capital were scarcely property at all; they could never be a source of aristocratic independence, and there was too much risk and exertion involved in acquiring that kind of property.⁴¹

Making proprietary property the measure of wisdom was not what most constitution makers in 1776 had expected. In his experience, said Jefferson in 1776, “Integrity” was not “the characteristic of wealth.”⁴² But he and other leaders were baffled by the apparent inability of the people to perceive the wise and truly talented. Lincoln himself lamented the fact that the people were not capable of choosing the proper men to fill the offices of government. If the people were learned and virtuous enough, he told his father in 1780,

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“a republican government might then be as convenient in practice as it is in theory.”⁴³ But since this was not what the populace was really like, gentry like Lincoln thus were reluctantly compelled to endorse property as the best possible source of distinction for their state senates. In no state was this emphasis on property as the basis for the senate more conspicuous than in Massachusetts.

During the debate over the proposed constitution of 1778 in Massachusetts, Theophilus Parsons in the Essex Result, the publication of the Essex County convention, spent a great deal of time discussing the difficulty of erecting an upper house. The proposed constitution of 1778 was defective, he wrote, because it provided for the selection of the senate by all the freemen: “a trust is reposed in the people which they are unequal to.” If Massachusetts wanted a proper senate containing “the greatest wisdom, firmness, consistency, and perseverance,” it had to look beyond the common people. “These qualities,” said Parsons, who later became chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, “will most probably be found amongst men of education and fortune,” especially fortune. On behalf of the Essex Convention Parsons admitted that all men of property were not at present men of learning and wisdom, but surely, he said, it was among the wealthy that the largest number of men of education and character could be found. Hence the senate, declared the Essex convention, should represent the property of the state.⁴⁴

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Since the weakness of the senate was one of the reasons the proposed constitution of 1778 was turned down, the convention that drew up the new Massachusetts constitution in 1780 was determined to remedy this defect. Not only did the senators have special property qualifications, but representation in the senate was based on the proportion of taxes paid by each senatorial district, in other words, on the value of the land in each district. And if this were not clear enough, the convention that drew up the new constitution of 1780 explicitly spelled out the difference between the two houses. “The House of Representatives is intended as the Representatives of the Persons, and the Senate of the property of the Commonwealth.”⁴⁵

Of course, making the senate the overt representative of property severely distorted the traditional meaning of mixed government.⁴⁶ Property was no longer simply a crude measure of the best and wisest men in the society. It had become a special interest in its own right, something requiring particular protection by one of the houses of the legislature. In 1776 the Revolutionaries had drawn no sharp distinction between persons and their property, for such a division would

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have undermined their commitment to the single public interest, the res publica, of republicanism.

By the 1780s many Americans had abandoned that earlier republican dream of equality and were busy trying to find a way of dealing with a society that had come apart and increasingly unequal. These intense discussions and debates in Massachusetts in the late 1770s and early 1780s over the framing of a constitution appropriate to the newly appreciated inequality of American society created the climate that produced the constitutional thinking of both Lincoln and Adams.

The new Massachusetts constitution did more than recognize and represent the widening social inequalities of the society, it exacerbated them. In extralegal conventions and fiery publications the disgruntled farmers in the western counties of the state voiced their objection to the very “existence” of the senate. They had a point. Since representation in the senate was based on the proportion of taxes paid by each senatorial district, representation in the senate of the wealthier eastern counties would be substantially greater than the senatorial representation of the poorer western counties of the state. In the minds of the westerners the upper house was loaded in favor of rich easterners.⁴⁷

Although the constitution seemed to benefit Lincoln’s kind of gentry, he was no more happy with it than the angry

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westerners. He thought the senate was deficient because it did not protect property enough. Even with senatorial representation based on the property of each district, the less well-off, he pointed out in essay No. VI, would still outnumber and could outvote the wealthy. He was equally unhappy with the fact that the governor’s veto was qualified and could be overridden by two-thirds of the legislature. Like Adams, Lincoln wanted the executive to have an absolute veto over all legislation.⁴⁸

Despite all his constitutional objections, in the end Lincoln fell back upon the major requirement for republican government that had been advocated by all the Revolutionaries in 1776. In order to support a republic, he wrote in essay Number X, “a general diffusion of knowledge and virtue are indispensable.” And this was true whatever the

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electoral process might be. “Without virtue no government long retained its freedom.” And since virtue was not natural but had to be taught, “the first attention of a free government is to be paid to the education of youth.” Whenever the people became “so deeply plunged in ignorance, or hardened in vice, as either not to know, or knowing not to choose those that are best qualified to perform the duties they are elected to discharge, … whenever either of these melancholy events shall take place,” warned Lincoln, “liberty, with all her attendant blessings, must take her flight to some happier clime, and leave the government to anarchy and ruin!”⁴⁹

A college like Harvard was a fine thing, but not sufficient for educating “the greater part of the community, men of small property, whose subsistence requires their and their children’s utmost industry.”⁵⁰ These poor and middling people needed instruction in public schools that were easily

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and cheaply available. All the villages, towns, parishes, and precincts ought to have schools and seminaries of instruction for all the ordinary people in the society.

It was on this matter of supporting widespread public education that the aristocratic Lincoln finally joined hands posthumously with his middling opponent William Manning—a linkage between the few and the many that has resonated through the whole of American history. In his “Key of Liberty” of 1799 Manning rightly understood that “learning and knowledge among the Many is the only support of liberty,” but he was wrong in assuming that the genteel few like Lincoln were opposed to public schooling and were bent on keeping the many in ignorance and superstition. Despite all their social and intellectual differences, both Lincoln and Manning ultimately agreed on what was really essential for the sustaining of republican government.⁵¹