"LIBERTY AND THE LAWS DEPEND ENTIRELY ON A SEPARATION OF [POWERS]": 1794 DEFINITIVE FIRST COMPLETE EDITION OF JOHN ADAMS' DEFENCE OF THE CONSTITUTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES
ADAMS, John. A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America…A New Edition. London: John Stockdale, 1794. Three volumes. Octavo, contemporary marbled boards rebacked and recornered to style in calf-gilt, red morocco spin labels; pp. (ii), (1-3), 4-8, (i)-xxviii, (xxix)-xxxii, (3)-392; (ii), (1)-451, (1); (ii), (1)-528, (i-xxxvi).
1794 definitive first complete edition of John Adams' major work on a constitutional separation of powers and a history of European republics, a powerful "case for checks and balances in government" (McCullough), one of the most important and widely read works by America's Founding Father and second president, in original marbled boards.
At the start of 1787, while minister to Great Britain and a year before he returned to America, John Adams "felt an urgency like that of 1776. Great events were taking place at home. Support for a stronger central government was gaining ground… A constitutional convention was in the offing, and as he had been impelled in 1776 to write his Thoughts on Government, so Adams plunged ahead… books piled about him, his pen scratching away until all hours… By early January 1787, Adams had rushed the first installment of his effort to a London printer. Titled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America… copies were sent off at once to the United States and to Jefferson in Paris" (McCullough, John Adams, 374). Of the Defence, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Adams, "I have read your book with infinite satisfaction and improvement. It will do great good in America. Its learning and its good sense will, I hope, make it an institute for our politicians, old as well as young" (Sowerby 3004). "From Philadelphia, where the Constitutional Convention had assembled, Benjamin Rush, a member of the Convention, wrote that the Defence had 'diffused such excellent principles among us, that there is little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compound federal legislature… To a considerable extent, Adams' Defence was an expanded, more erudite rendition of the case for checks and balances in government that he had championed in his Thoughts on Government (1776), and later put into operation in his draft of the Massachusetts constitution" (McCullough, 375). Adams concludes this work with a printing of the very text he is defending, the draft of the Constitution submitted in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787 (III:507-28). "The work did much to familiarize the European mind to the novel state of things then taking place in America" (Sabin 236). Containing Adams' descriptions of the Italian republics of the Middle Ages as well as his analysis of "the Right Constitution of a Commonwealth." Volume I preceded by the 1787 London (Dilly) and American first editions. In 1788 Adams wrote volumes II and III, which were published in London the same year by Dilly. With engraved portrait of Adams (I); bound without half titles. Howes A60. Sabin 235. ESTC T83247. Goldsmiths 15903. See Sabin 233-34; Evans 20176-77, 31689-91. Volume I with tiny early shelf notations to initial blank.
Interior generally fresh with just light scattered foxing and faint marginal dampstaining to first and last few leaves.