170 Chapter VIII
The Massachusetts constitution prescribed certain qualifications for eligibility.
The governor was required to have a freehold worth at least £1,000, senators a free-
hold of £300 or £600 total estate, representatives a freehold of £100 or £200 total
estate. (British law at this time required £300 or £600 annual income from land to
qualify for the House of Commons.) These Massachusetts requirements resembled
those in North Carolina, where the governor had to have a £1,000 freehold, and
members of the upper and lower houses freeholds of 300 or 100 acres respectively.
In the absence of comparative statistics on land values and distribution of land own-
ership in the two states, it is impossible to compare the real impact of these legal
qualifications for office. In Massachusetts, however, whatever may have been true in
North Carolina, the average 100- acre one- family farm was worth well over £300,
and there were a great many such farms, so that the ordinary successful farmer could
qualify for either house of the legislature, and a few well- to- do ones in almost every
village might if they chose have aspired to the office of governor.^18 The requirements
in Massachusetts, as set forth by John Adams, were, if anything, Jeffersonian or
agrarian in their tendency, since they favored the farm population, and made it even
harder for middle- class townspeople, who might own no land, to occupy public of-
fice. The aim was clearly to limit office to the substantial segment of the population,
but the substantial segment was broadly defined. Still, there were people who by this
definition were not “substantial,” and some of them objected to these provisions,
though not many would in any case have ventured to run for office or been elected
if they did, in the Massachusetts of 1780.
It was Article III of the Declaration of Rights, both in Adams’ draft and in the
finished constitution, that caused most debate in the convention and most dis-
agreement among the voters during ratification. This article, declaring religion to
be the foundation of morality and of the state, authorized the legislature to “en-
join” people to go to church, and required the use of public funds to maintain the
churches, while allowing any “subject” to have his own contribution paid to the
denomination of his choice. While it received a large majority of the popular vote,
8,885 to 6,225, it was the one article which most clearly failed to obtain a two-
thirds majority, and the one which may have never been legally ratified, though
declared so by the convention. Those voting against it expressed a desire to separate
church and state. These, in turn, included perhaps a few Baptists who favored such
separation on religious principle, a great many Protestants who feared that the ar-
ticle might legalize Roman Catholicism, and an unknown number of people, one
suspects, who were no longer very regular in attending any church at all.
The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 was adopted by a two- thirds majority
in a popular referendum from which no free adult male was excluded. The vote was
light, for opinion on the matter seems not to have been excited.^19 It was six years
bers is stressed by those who see the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 as a very conservative or re-
actionary document. I confess to sharing the impatience of Professor Brown at academic theories
which dissolve under a little grade- school computation.
18 Brown, op.cit., 18, 394.
19 About 23 per cent of adult males voted on ratification of the constitution of 1780, a figure
which may be compared with 30 per cent of adult males voting on ratification of the French constitu-
tion of 1793, with the difference that in the France of 1793 only those voting “yes” took the trouble to