Suspected of Independence by David McKean

Author:David McKean
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610392228
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

16

“An Assembly of Demigods”

“WE SEEM AFRAID,” CHIEF JUSTICE MCKEAN WROTE TO JOHN Adams in the spring of 1787, “to enable anyone to do good lest he should do evil.” McKean was writing John Adams after reading his three-volume work, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.1 At the time, Adams represented the United States in London as its chief diplomat. Aware that the Articles of Confederation continued to provide an insufficient governing framework and that support for a stronger central government was gaining ground in America, Adams had felt compelled to provide the conceptual structure for constitutional governance. He spent evenings writing feverishly in his London library, books stacked about him, marking quotations and passages from the works of philosophers, historians, and political theorists, including Machiavelli, Locke, Hobbes, Milton, Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Plato. Adams had drawn from over fifty books in his research, and although the tome’s narrative was choppy, interrupted with historical references—though with few citations—McKean found the book to be a thoughtful, high-minded analysis of what a future American government should look like.2

In his book, Adams was especially critical of vesting excessive power in a unicameral legislature. “What was to restrain it from making tyrannical law?”3 Besides Georgia, Pennsylvania was the only state in the country with a unicameral legislature—it would not be altered until 1790. Adams argued that effective governance required checks and balances, and that meant a bicameral legislature as well as equally strong executive and judicial branches.

Adams’s views resonated with McKean. “The balance of the one, the few, and the many,” McKean acknowledged to his friend from Massachusetts, “is not well poised in this state.” The chief justice complained, “The legislature is too powerful for the executive and judicial branches of the government . . . it can too easily make laws, and too easily alter or repeal them.” He agreed with Adams that “we must have another branch, and a negative in the executive, stability in our laws, before we shall be reputable, safe and happy.”4

As a result of his time as president of the Congress, McKean understood better than most the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation. He recognized that the thirteen states needed something more than shared values and vague concepts of comity in order to function effectively. But McKean did not completely accept Adams’s recommendations for a new national government. “In general,” McKean confessed, “I dislike innovations, especially in the administration of justice; and I would avoid tampering with constitutions of government, as with edge-tools.” Perhaps as chief justice of one of the—if not the—most powerful states in the country, he didn’t relish the prospect of competing with a potential federal court.5

Still, McKean found himself “in concurrence in all the sentiments” of Adams’s work. Sharing McKean’s approbation, Thomas Jefferson praised the book’s “learning and good sense,” and even James Madison, who didn’t much like Adams, admitted that the book had “merit.”6

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