“Unlocking Humanity: The Surprising Secret Behind What Makes Us Truly Human”
In the end, Adams simply applied these and similar ideas in his pamphlet to the Massachusetts constitution he crafted.
Going back to that, he began the constitution with a Preamble, then the Declaration of Rights, including such things as prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, right to a trial by jury and “right of every citizen to be tried by judges as free, impartial and independent as the lot of humanity will admit”, as it is “essential to the preservation of the rights of every individual, his life, liberty, property, and character, that there be an impartial interpretation of the laws, and administration of justice.” He also included freedom of religion, right to petition the government, etc.
In all of this, with the clear statement of the entire purpose of this constitution is to ensure, once again, “it may be a government of laws and not of men”.
We Hold These Truths to Be Self Evident
He also very purposefully put this Declaration of Rights before the Frame of Government portion in order to give extra emphasis on it. We’ll get to in a bit why the U.S. Constitution originally left such a Bill of Rights out. But for now, Adams thought defining an enforceable basic set of rights each citizen has under their government was essential for any government to have as core tenants, both in providing extra stability to the citizenry, as well as another check to help stave off abuses from all those in power.
Or as Thomas Jefferson would later ring in when discussing the U.S. Constitution, writing to James Madison on December 20, 1787, “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
