The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams

2. A DISSERTATION ON THE CANON AND FEUDAL LAW

Write_001-051.indd 19 3/30/12 1:11 PM A DISSERTATION ON THE CANON AND FEUDAL LAW Write_001-051.indd 20 3/30/12 1:11 PM EARLY IN I765 jOHN ADAMS BEGAN WRITING an essay on the history of ecclesiastical and civil despotism for the Sodality, a private club of Boston lawyers. His purpose was to contrast the tyranny of the canon and feudal law against New England's heroic struggle for freedom. He soon decided to expand and publish his "Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law" when he learned of Parliament's approval of the Stamp Act in March 1765. In his diary, Adams described the Stamp Act as an "enormous Engine, fabricated by the british Parliament, for battering down all the Rights and Liberties of America." The "Dissertation" is an essay in political education. Its larger purpose was to raise an alarm against an impending threat and to rouse the people in defense of their rights. Adams saw in the Stamp Act an early-warning signal indicating the direction of British colonial policy. It violated in two important ways the most fundamental principle of the English constitution: the principle of consent. The Stamp Act denied the rights guaranteed by Magna Carta that no citizen shall be deprived ofhis property or taxed without his consent, and it extended juryless courts of admiralty into the American colonies. When combined with the recently passed Sugar Act, the Stamp Act permitted the transfer of revenue enforcement from regular common-law courts to the newly empowered admiralty courts. In Adams's eyes, this meant that unconstitutional courts would now enforce unconstitutional taxes. He concludes rather ominously by suggesting that there was "a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America." 20 Write_001-051.indd 21 3/30/12 1:11 PM 2 A DISSERTATION ON THE CANON AND FEUDAL LAW "IGNORANCE AND INCONSIDERATION are the twO great causes of the ruin of mankind." This is an observation of Dr. Tillotson, with relation to the interest of his fellow men in a future and immortal state. Bur it is of equal truth and importance if applied to the happiness of men in society, on this side the grave. In the earliest ages of the world, absolute monarchy seems to have been the universal form of government. Kings, and a few of their great counsellors and captains, exercised a cruel tyranny over the people, who held a rank in the scale of intelligence, in those days, bur little higher than the camels and elephants that carried them and their engines to war. By what causes it was brought to pass, that the people in the middle ages became more intelligent in general, would not, perhaps, be possible in these days to discover. Bur the fact is certain; and wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion. Man has certainly an exalted soul; and the same principle in human nature,-that aspiring, noble principle founded in benevolence, and cherished by knowledge ; I mean the love of power, which has been so often the cause of slavery ,-has, whenever freedom has existed, been the cause of freedom. If it is this principle that has always prompted the princes and nobles of the earth, by every species of fraud and violence to shake off all the limitations of their power, it is the same that has always stimulated the common people to aspire at independency, and to endeavor at confining the power of the great within the limits of equity and reason. The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were ofarts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been 21 Write_001-051.indd 22 3/30/12 1:11 PM A DISSERTATION ON THE CANON AND FEUDAL LAW known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government,-Rights, that...