I am reading The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff’s biography of one of the people who helped set in motion the events that shaped the American Revolution 250 years ago. Adams, who entered Harvard as a thirteen-year-old undergraduate in 1743, eventually earned his Master’s Degree there, too. In those days, higher education centered around the ideas of the great thinkers of the classical era, but the study of Enlightenment thinkers was also popular. Schiff notes that “the sole academic requirement for the degree was a thesis: in Latin, a master’s candidate answered a theoretical question drawn from a list of 400 questions covering the realms of philosophy, ethics, religion, and science” (p. 31).
Adams, then twenty years old, chose this topic: “Is it lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the republic cannot otherwise be preserved?” As Schiff reports, “Few others asked at the time—when George Washington was a child, Thomas Jefferson months old, and James Madison yet to be born—if resistance to a king might be justified” (p.33). Adams’ answer was a firm “Yes.” He argued that, while civil government was a blessing that protected individual citizens from the self-interest of others, when a leader’s actions imperil the rights of other citizens, “he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience” (ibid.). Three decades later, Adams would become a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the architects of the principles that made American democracy a model for other nations.
Today, as we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America in 2026, the principles that Adams and his colleagues debated are being challenged again, and we need to re-affirm the principles on which the nation was founded. What is the responsibility of a leader? How should citizens—individually and through their government representatives in Congress—respond when a leader dis-respects the principles that shaped and continue to guide the way we govern ourselves as a community? A year away from our 250th anniversary as a constitutional democracy, we need to re-affirm our understanding of and commitment to our constitutional democracy.
