“Unlocking Humanity: The Surprising Secret Behind What Makes Us Truly Human”
Thus, after this failure, the second time around, they decided to follow Adams’ suggestion of a separate body needed, with delegates selected from the people to represent them in it.
In the end, despite 311 other delegates peripherally involved, what Adams ended up writing was largely left as is when it was presented more widely, with only a handful of trivial modifications.
For example, ever the realist, the idea that all men are born “equal” was a notion Adams didn’t feel wholly accurate. In his view, all men deserve equal rights. But he felt it was not technically correct to say all men are equal except in the eyes of God. Rather, he thought that some people are superior or inferior to others in character, intelligence, strength, and other such attributes and abilities. Thus, his original version of the Massachusetts Constitution said, “All men are born equally free and independent.” And if you’re wondering, Adams abhorred slavery and very much was including those of African descent in that statement as well. However, the other delegates would modify this “born equally free and independent” to “All men are born free and equal.”
Both sentiments, “All men are born equally free and independent” and “all men are born free and equal” more or less accomplished the same thing from a practical standpoint, but one of them is slightly less accurate than the other. And both were inaccurate given the present state of things with slavery in Massachusetts. But we’ll get to the super interesting part about this shortly.
