Debating Constitutionalism: John Adams's Discourses on Davila

In 1758, a young John Adams writing in his diary posed to himself the question of what value, if any, the study of the distant past had for himself and his contemporaries. In considering the question, Adams soundly rejected any intrinsic value in the knowledge of what we might today call “factoids,” declaring, “I would pay no more Admiration to a man who could [tell] me the exact Highth [sic] of Cicero, or the Number of hairs that grew upon his Head…than I would to one could tell me the exact Number of Letters, Commas and semicolons that are in all his Works.” The objective of the study of history, Adams concluded, was not “naked Knowledge of great names and [Actions], but rather “personal Improvement in Virtue and Capacity, by imitating the Virtues and avoiding the Vices of great men, and by judging the Effects of Causes now at Work, by those Causes which have appeared heretofore.” The study of the past thus was only important in so far as it informed behaviour, and even political policy, in the present.

A little over thirty years later, in 1790, the then-Vice-President Adams began publishing in the Gazette of the United States a series of what ultimately numbered thirty-two columns, in which he offered a translation of, and commentary on, Enrico Caterino Davila's Dell’Istoria delle Guerre civili di Francia (1630), a popular and widely acclaimed historical work of the prior century. Adams owned a French translation of Davila, and envisioned his own Discourses as a sequel of sorts to his recent treatise, Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–1788), a wide-ranging work of political theory whose stated aim was to respond to criticisms levelled against American state constitutions by French statesman Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781). The later Discourses, in turn, provided a medium for Adams to expound on his personal (and controversial) brand of what some contemporary and later scholarly critics perceived as “aristocratic” republicanism. Indeed, some years later, when Adams published his columns in book form (1805), he acknowledged the controversy the articles had caused, as they appeared to some of his critics to expose the now-former President of the United States as a clandestine monarchist.