John Adams Response To The Declaration Of Independence

The Declaration of Independence had represented the American vision of virtue. The U.S. Constitution represented the American vision of practicality and necessity. 55 men of practical affairs gathered to frame the constitution of the developing United States of America to create a new and unprecedented national covenant. John Adams called the Constitution "the single greatest effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen." Historian Max Farrand wrote: "Neither a work of divine origin, nor 'the greatest work that was ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man,' but a practical, workable document is this constitution of the United States. Planned to meet certain immediate needs and modified to suit the exigencies
In November 1787 Jefferson wrote of the Constitution: "There are very good articles in it; & very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a chief magistrate eligible for a longer duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: & what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent & perservering lying." The same day, Jefferson wrote John Adams to "confess there are things in it which stagger all my dispositions to subscribe to what such an assembly has proposed. The house of federal representatives will not be adequate to the management of affairs either foreign or federal. Their President seems a bad edition of a Polish king. He may be reelected from 4. years to 4. years for life. Reason and experience prove to us that a chief magistrate, so continuable, is an offer for life." In the same letter, Jefferson pressed Madison for a Bill of Rights, writing "that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, & what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences." In March 1789, Jefferson wrote: "What I disapproved from the first moment also was the want of a bill of rights to guard liberty against the legislative as well as executive branches of the government, that is to say to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury in all cases determinable by the laws of the land."344 Two days later, Jefferson responded to Madison's defense of the absence of a bill of rights in the Constitution. Speaking of "subordinate governments: "The declaration of rights will be the text