The People as Constituent Power 169
that the £3 and £60 of 1780 represent an increase of only one- eighth over the
figures of 1691. Even if half the people of Boston were unfranchised, all Boston
then had only a twentieth of the population of the state. In the rural areas, where
farm ownership was usual, it was mainly grown sons living for a few years with
their parents who lacked the vote. There seems to have been only sporadic objec-
tion to the suffrage provision.
Adams put into the constitution, and the convention retained it, that ghost of
King, Lords, and Commons that now assumed the form of governor, senate, and
house of representatives. Partisans of the British system, in England or America,
would surely find this ghost highly attenuated. The point about King and Lords, in
the British system, was precisely that they were not elected by anyone, that they
were immune to popular pressure, or any pressure, through their enjoyment of life
tenure and hereditary personal rights to political position. Governor and senators
in Massachusetts, like representatives, both in Adams’ draft and in the final docu-
ment, were all elected, all by the same electorate, and all for one- year terms. To
Adams (as, for example, to Delolme), it was of the utmost importance to prevent
the executive from becoming the mere creature of the legislature. He even wished
the governor to have an absolute veto, which the convention changed to a veto
that could be overridden by a two- thirds majority of both houses. Adams contin-
ued to prefer a final veto. Jeffersonians and their numerous progeny found this
highly undemocratic. In all states south of New York, at the end of the Revolu-
tion, governors were elected by the legislative houses, and none had any veto.
Adams justified the veto as a means “to preserve the independence of the execu-
tive and judicial departments.”^15 And since governors could no longer be ap-
pointed by the crown, an obvious way to prevent their dependence on legislatures
was to have them issue, like legislators, from the new sovereign, the people. It was
legislative oligarchy that Adams thought the most imminent danger. As he wrote
to Jefferson in 1787: “You are afraid of the one—I, of the few.”^16
As for the phantom “lords,” or senators, though they were directly elected by
the ordinary voters for one- year terms, they were in a way supposed to represent
property rather than numbers. They were apportioned among the counties of
Massachusetts not according to population but according to taxes paid, that is,
according to assessed value of taxable wealth. Suffolk County, which included
Boston, thus received 6 senators out of 40, where on a purely numerical basis it
would have received only four. The Maine districts, Cape Cod, and the western
counties were numerically somewhat underrepresented. The three central and
western counties received 11 senators, where a representation in proportion to
numbers would have given them 12 or 13. Inequalities in wealth in Massachusetts,
as between individuals or as between city and country, were not yet great enough
to make a senate apportioned according to “property” (which included the small
man’s property as well as the rich man’s) very different from a senate apportioned
according to numbers.^17
15 Adams, Work s (1851), IV, 231 and 232 note.
16 Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XII (Princeton, 1955), 396.
17 Compare the apportionment of senators in the Massachusetts constitution with the popula-
tion of counties in the census of 1790. The fact that the senate represented property rather than num-