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John Adams and the Constitutional History of the Medieval British Empire
James
Muldoon
Studies in
Modern History London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018 Hardcover. xv + 267 pages. ISBN 978-3319664767. £80
Reviewed by Christopher N. Fritsch Fort Worth, Texas
Often in
our rush to understand the past, we bring a great deal of our present to these
historical studies. The past, then, becomes a reflection of who we are and what
we want the past to be. In the end, we uncover incomplete or inadequate
answers. Searching
for a better answer, James Muldoon fashioned a very understandable, yet complex
question. What did eighteenth-century North American colonists, such as John
Adams, know of the past and how was that past useful in the exposition of
revolutionary ideas and goals? For students of American colonial political,
legal and constitutional thought, this question and work is anything but a road
to nowhere. Most of us acknowledge the development of colonial bicameral
legislatures since 1620, and the incorporation of constitutional amendments
reflective of Magna Carta, both of which are medieval in origin. Additionally,
if you trained as an attorney, as John Adams did, the subject of this work,
this non-university training and later practice demanded broader reading and an
approach to that knowledge which was inherently historical. In this regard,
Adams embarked on his legal education, which brought him into intellectual
contact with a variety of jurists and juridical texts, including Justinian,
Bracton, Fleta, Littleton, and Coke. The past, the last five hundred years of
legal and constitutional development in Great Britain and the continent, was
not an undiscovered country for Adams. In fact, for Adams, the past was both
practical and applicable to his profession and later to his understanding of
British-colonial relations—the politics of revolution. For Muldoon, Adams
trained to be a lawyer and became a historian. The book,
then, is rather straightforward. Muldoon writes to answer his question about
John Adams’s understanding of the past. In order to do this, the author focuses
upon two pre-Revolution works—the Dissertation
on Canon and Feudal Laws and the Novanglus
essays. Through these works, Muldoon looks to answer his main question, but
also address what was important in the developing rift between Great Britain
and the colonies of North America. Here, Muldoon squarely places the
revolutionary impetus towards a conflict regarding constitutional and legal
issues. As Muldoon states, by emphasising Adams and his understanding and
presentation of the past, the book returns “to the approach of the ‘imperial
school’ of American historians—an approach ‘which stressed the continuities
between the medieval and early development of England and the development of
the North American colonies’.” [35] Standard
interpretations of John Adams and the American Revolution view the
eighteenth-century as a pre-modern period. Recently, historians interpret the
Founders and the American Revolution through the Enlightenment, moving the
colonies towards “modernity”. Muldoon sets this aside in order to understand
Adams as legal and constitutional historian and how his understanding of the
medieval world shed light on his present day and the impending transatlantic
conflict. Through the Dissertation
and Novanglus, Muldoon sees Adams
writing a history of the British Empire from the twelfth century to the moment
of crisis after the Seven Years’ War. Initially,
Muldoon examines Adams and the Dissertation
on Canon and Feudal Laws. Here, Adams questioned the
origins of rights and the limits upon government. He believed these origins
to be in the England of William the Conqueror. For Adams, the Norman Conquest
brought the establishment of the ‘Norman Yoke’. What
was once a republic, Saxon England, now came under control of invaders, who
corrupted and destroyed the old republic. Since that time, the work to restore
the ancient constitution, the ancient rights against absolutism and arbitrary
government continued. According to Muldoon, ‘Adams
framed his history of the British Empire in terms of a continual struggle
between republican liberty and feudal and ecclesiastical tyranny’
[43]. For Adams, the
struggle between these two points continued, as the contemporary debate focused
upon the passage and implementation of the Stamp Act and the rumour that the
Church of England would send a bishop to America. The Norman yoke remained, and
the fight to secure republican liberties and to limit the power of government
continued. For Adams, this history held a direct impact on the construction of
the eighteenth-century British empire. Muldoon
sees the seriousness of this connection. The author draws us first to Adams’s
seventeenth-century past and then to the Norman conquest of Saxon England. In
this context, conquest created two political conclusions. First, conquest ended
the continual development of freedom and liberty in Saxon England. Secondly,
conquest meant the implementation of the Norman yoke—canon and feudal law. Since
this moment, greater Britain struggled to regain the freedoms lost at Hastings,
while William the Conqueror’s kingly descendants worked to tighten their grip
upon the nation and empire. The
transformation from a nation of ‘free and equal citizens governing themselves
through representative institutions’ to a nation of unyielding monarchs and
landlords made 1066 a critical moment. Since that time, Britons worked
steadfastly to regain rights that were lost and threatened. The conflict held
many key, and sometimes ambivalent, moments. 1215 and the writing of Magna
Carta was an initial stop in regaining lost rights. Henry VIII’s revolution of
the sixteenth century contained a sharp double edge. Henry ended more than four
centuries of ecclesiastical domination from the Papacy, but in so doing, Henry
consolidated church and state power into one personage. From this moment, the
political, constitutional, and theological debate brought monarchs into
conflict over the identity of the nation. What did it mean to be Protestant and
who held the power to determine men’s consciences? Beginning
the Dissertation, Adams quoted
seventeenth-century cleric, John Tillotson. “Ignorance and inconsideration are
the two great causes of the ruin of mankind” [47]. Adams believed that this
spoke to men of all conditions. Ignorance and inconsideration could be both the
ruin of men’s lives and their souls. However, where knowledge and sensibility
occur in man, arbitrary and oppressive government can not. Where the love of
power exists, so too does the love of freedom. Here, Adams connects the Norman
love of power—William’s support of conquest by the Papacy and his creation of
feudal tenures for his friends and supporters (the establishment of the Norman
yoke)—to the Saxon desire for freedom. The struggle against the “yoke”
continued through the establishment of the Puritan Massachusetts and Adams’s
America. Adams believed that his seventeenth-century predecessors to the Bay
Colony struggled against Stuart oppression, “not [for] religion alone…but it
was a love of universal Liberty, and an hatred, a dread, an horror, of the
internal confederacy” of this religious and magisterial tyranny [51]. Thus, the
past conflicts between tyranny and oppression versus liberty and freedom
continued under new administrations and guises.
Adams was
not always a singular voice, but rather a counterpoint to the imperial history
presented by others, such as Daniel Leonard. In the Novanglus essays,
Adams, as much political commentator as historian, responded to Leonard’s
description of the British Empire. Muldoon summarises Leonard’s position, as an
Empire which “colonists have had in the past and enjoyed at the moment, and
could confidently expect in the future, great economic benefits from
membership” [154]. Furthermore, Muldoon presents the Leonard position as an
historical one—“the British Empire was the result of a process that had
extended over a long time” [159]. Adams demanded to see the documents outlining
such a political process. Here, Adams wrote against the leading Massachusetts
Tories of his day, and compared their ‘wicked policies’ to previous rulers,
such as Julius Caesar and Charles V. These Tories presented contemporary
British ‘king in parliament’ sovereignty, which to Adams was the current yoke
of unchallenged and unbridled power. In the Novanglus exchange, Adams,
and his Loyalist counterpart, Daniel Leonard, wrote competing histories of
empire, and these essays explained their positions relative to the origins of
rights and government, vis-a-vis the current situation of both within the
transatlantic debate. What is
fascinating about Muldoon’s work is the ground it covers beyond the immediate
question. Historiographically, Muldoon links issues of medieval legal and
constitutional debates with seventeenth-century arguments and revolutions,
while seeing these as critical for the development of empire or perhaps the
eighteenth-century construction of a commonwealth of nations. Instead of a
usual discourse in which the Revolution and the Constitution are foundation to
modern development, Muldoon gives us a look at Adams as a figure within the
Enlightenment, but that moment needed to be understood through historical
understanding and process. Muldoon admits that, as much as America’s
revolutionaries “shared a
belief in rational Christianity, progress, and republicanism”, their arguments
and their future had to be grounded in something, somewhere [xii]. The future
which Adams saw was not the future of America as Lockean or liberal. Muldoon’s
John Adams saw the Revolution as restorative—America as the next great empire
and restorer of the Saxon republic and its ancient rights. In fashion with J.G.A.
Pocock, the upheavals and revolutions since 1066 were all foundational to 1776.
The
outstanding merit of this work is the starting point. As Muldoon shows, much of
the historiography fails to address the medieval impact upon colonial
revolutionaries. He rightfully takes us away from Cincinnatus and Roman
republicanism and Athenian democracy and places us where the English debates
between ruler and ruled begin—the Middle Ages. Close examination of John
Adams’s legal studies and his library reflect his understanding of the origins
of the common law and the debates relative to the ancient constitution. His
legal training led him to see the importance of the past and the historical
study of that past. Finally, Muldoon moves us to seeing Adams as a historically
minded Founder and oppositional to Loyalists, who conceived a very different
historical process, and other Founders who were much more
Enlightenment-oriented presentists.
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