1688 & 1776 again – Willi Paul Adams "The First American Constitutions" (Williamsburg, 1980)

Willi Paul Adams (1940-2002; Wikipedia here) was a German political historian who wrote extensively about the American revolution. His 1980 book The First American Constitutions: 
Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era is regarded as one of the finest texts on the subject. It was a translation into English of his 1973 book Republikanische Verfassung und bürgerliche Freiheit. It is still in print – buy a copy on Amazon here.

It has a number of important references to the connections with the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Here are some of them.

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(p. 8-11)

• The English Constitution in the Eighteenth Century

American republicanism did not arise as a counterideology to what had preceded it. It was the product of a political life that from the first decades of colonisation had evolved in close conjunction with political developments in the mother country. The experiments in self-government that began in the first settlements were no less a part of British constitutional development than the concept of parliamentary sovereignty that had been taking shape in England since 1688. But it became clear from 1764 on that if both these principles were consistently adhered to, they would prove incompatible, even though both principles derived from the same political traction of opposition to unlimited government.

Ever since 1688 the English political system had used constitutional means to settle disputes between interest groups, that is, it had accepted some basic rules governing the division of power and the decision-making process. After the Seven Years' War, some of the colonies found their interests more at odds with those of the mother country than ever before, and this division between England and the colonies inevitably took the form of constitutional conflict. This does not mean that the constitutional quarrel over taxation in the colonies was the sole "cause" of the American Revolution. It was only one aspect of a many-faceted dispute. But the fact that this conflict expressed itself in the concepts and forms of Anglo-American constitutionalism determined to a large extent the course of developments leading to Independence and the founding of the new political order.

The Americans who advocated a system of colonial self-government within the framework of the empire, and the British who insisted on parliamentary sovereignty, both claimed adherence to the principles of the revolution of 1688. Although the exponents of the crown and of the parliamentary majority rejected the constitutional views of the colonists as incompatible with the English constitution, in reality the colonists were not setting up a new "republican" or "democratic' political theory in opposition to Parliament's claim to sovereignty. On the contrary, they justified their resistance to direct taxation by Parliament by referring to the rights the English constitution guaranteed to the subjects of the crown. They demanded only that the principles of 1688 be applied to the population of the colonies as well as to the mother country. The main argument in the Declaration of Independence - that if a monarch does not fulfill his obligations as a ruler, he nullifies the contract between himself and his subjects - was itself part of the constitutional theory of 1688.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the English constitution was regarded as the best model for achieving political stability and for protecting individual security from arbitrary acts of government. Ever since the last Stuart king fled England in 1688 and his daughter and son-in-law assumed the throne in 1689 at the invitation of and under the conditions dictated by members of the upper and lower houses, the monarchical component of the English constitution had not been based on legitimation by the grace of God. The coronation oath required the new monarchs to exercise their office in accordance with "the statutes in parliament agreed upon, and the laws and customs of the same."

The principles of 1688 derived primarily from the recognition of three independent decision-making entities that were obliged to cooperate in the legislative process: the crown, the upper house, and the lower house. Executive power rested solely with the king, the highest judicial function with the upper house. The degree of political influence of each entity varied with the personalities that held any particular office. The crown retained the political initiative, chose ministers, and tried to increase its influence over Parliament by rewarding cooperative members with lucrative offices, by gerrymandering, and by utilising other means of corruption. But the king could not keep a minister for any extended length of time against the will of the lower house, and neither the king nor his prime minister could take any major steps without considering the wishes of the majority in the lower house.

Over and above the limits this parliamentary system imposed on the crown, independent judges saw to it that individual legal rights were safeguarded under the common law and under Parliament's declaration of basic human rights. The deliberations between Parliament and William and Mary were constitutionally codified in the Bill of Rights of 1689, which was officially entitled "Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown." The law "declared" William and Mary king and queen of England, France, Ireland, and their dominions and clearly defined the prerogatives of the crown in order to prevent the abuses of absolutism. The law established those features of English government that Enlightenment thinkers would later praise so highly, It forbade the crown to nullify a law or to refuse to carry it out, to levy taxes without the consent of Parliament, to maintain a standing army in peacetime without Parliamentary consent, and to take any member of Parliament to court for statements made in parliamentary session. Parliament would no longer convene solely at the discretion of the king, but it would meet "frequently." The elections of members to the lower house would be "free." The law also prohibited the courts from setting excessively high bail or imposing cruel and unusual punishments. The Bill of Rights guaranteed Protestant citizens the right to bear arms, and it guaranteed to all citizens the right to petition the king without fear of retaliatory legal action.

Together with the Act of Toleration of 1689, the Triennial Act of 1694, the Act of Settlement of 1701, and the Septennial Act of 1716, which superseded the Triennial Act, the Bill of Rights formed the major part of the written English constitution in the eighteenth century.

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(p 18)

• The American Concept of a Constitution

The central role played by British constitutionalism in justifying colonial resistance was carried over into American thinking about constitutions when the colonies began writing their own in 1776. The basic premise of the colonists' argument was that the political order created in 1688, though formulated only in statutes, could not be changed even by a majority decision in Parliament approved by the crown. This English constitution, the colonists argued, was a permanent code to which the stewards of governmental power - the king and Parliament - were subject and that they had no authority to alter. Decades before the colonists created their own constitutions. they emphasised, almost more than the Whigs in the home country had done, the inviolability of the rulings of 1688 and 1689. The colonists saw all constitutions as analogous to the constitutional documents with which they were most familiar - their charters.

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(p. 153)

Ever since the revolution of 1688, not only English patriots but also many political commentators in Europe looked upon the English constitution as the freest in the world, and well into the year 1776 numerous articles and pamphlets in the colonies continued to praise the English constitution because it protected freedom better than any other. The opponents of independence exploited this assumption for their own use and argued that freedom would be lost under an independent American regime. The removal of the constraints imposed by the British constitutional tradition would result in domination by the capricious will of the people. The main reply to Paine's critique of the British constitution, therefore, was the assertion that for all its defects this constitution effectively guaranteed the liberty of a British subject.

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(p. 170)

In December 1774, for instance, Massachusetts lawyer and supporter of the crown Daniel Leonard condemned the First Continental Congress for inciting to rebellion because they had tried to convince the people "that all men by nature are equal," that kings are servants of the people, and that the people can reclaim delegated power if they feel oppressed by it. John Adams responded to Leonard, contending that the colonists' views did not constitute any new revolutionary doctrine but were merely a reiteration of the "revolution principles" of 1689. Adams insisted that such principles had been propounded by Aristotle, Plato, Livy, Cicero, Harrington, Sidney, and Locke and were based on nature and reason." He glossed over the fact, of course, that parliamentary sovereignty had also been one of the principles of 1688.

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