The Worlds Between Adams and Burke

May 6, 2025

By Richard Samuelson

In “The Constitution in Their Hearts” Michael Lucchese has written a Burkean account of conservatism that follows Russell Kirk in arguing: A) conservatism is fundamentally the same in America as Britain; and B) that John Adams plays the role of Burke in the United States.  But he seems not to give enough thought to Kirk’s decision to entitle the lead chapter on Burke in The Conservative Mind “Burke and the Politics of Prescription,” and the following chapter on Adams “John Adams and Liberty Under Law.” In those titles Kirk implicitly acknowledged that conservatism, a philosophy that pays a great deal of attention to particulars, had different centers in Britain and the U.S.

There is, of course, a great deal that Britain and America have in common. There is a reason why people sometimes talk of a political “Anglosphere.” But there are also important differences across the ocean. 

The settlers in North America who rebelled in 1776 and created the United States were overwhelmingly from England, with a hefty and increasing addition of people from Scotland, Germany, and other places in the late colonial era. That being the case, American culture does owe a great deal to English traditions, including the common law, representative government, Shakespeare, and Anglo-Protestantism. The trouble is that we are also divided by a common language and by sub-species of that common heritage. Anyone serious about conserving America needs to reckon with the differences as well as the similarities.

In his great speech on “Conciliation with the Colonies” in 1775 Burke himself noted some of these tensions. In that speech Burke tried, one last time, to convince his fellow members of Parliament that the empire as it had developed under “a wise and salutary neglect” was well crafted, and was immensely beneficial to Britain. To maintain the empire, though, Burke insisted that it was necessary to understand that laws and policies that worked at home might not be appropriate in North America.

With regard to the distinction between American politics and British politics, Burke noted, there was a very important line of separation. America was English, but in the colonies, particularly the Northern ones, what was a minority sub-culture in England was the dominant culture. As a crude analogy, picture an American outpost in which 80% of the population hails from Texas. It would be “American”—but also American in an idiosyncratic way.

In the British empire the key line was religion (although it is worth noting that Adams’ Puritan ancestors also came from distinct regions of England). As Burke put it:

The Church of England too was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government. But the dissenting interests have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world, and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the Northern Provinces, where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people.

That spirit, the spirit of dissenting Protestantism was imbibed by Adams and his fellow New Englanders with their mother’s milk. That heritage created a line of separation across the ocean, and one that makes Adams’ conservatism quite different from Burke’s. 

When Adams and Jefferson toured England during a break in their diplomatic duties they stopped in Worcester. Adams was horrified to find that the locals did not know that that is where Cromwell’s crowning defeat of Charles I had taken place.  As Page Smith noted in his excellent biography of Adams, Adams recorded his reaction to the locals. “I was provoked and asked, ‘And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground; much holier than that on which your churches stand. All England should come in a pilgrimage to this hill once a year.” Burke, and Burkean conservatism, could never be associated with such a sentiment or practice. That was the kind of memory Adams thought the English should revere and preserve. 

One sees this in Adams’ 1765 (not 1763) “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.” The Dissertation is very much a dissenting Protestant argument. It denounced the “wicked confederation” between the canon and feudal law, and praises the Reformation as the key turn against the tyranny that they, particularly when allied, represented. “As long as this confederacy lasted, and the people were held in ignorance, liberty, and with her, knowledge and virtue too, seem to have deserted the earth, and one age of darkness succeeded another, till God in his benign providence raised up the champions who began and conducted the Reformation.” Adams thought that that liberal spirit of the Reformation was strongest in England, and even moreso in the colonies (particularly those of New England).  “It was this great struggle that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed; but it was a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy before described, that projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America.” 

Adams’ conservatism wished to conserve that spirit of liberty. In England it was prudent to minimize the radicalism of 1688—and that is what Burke did. In the colonies, particularly those of the North, it was prudent and fundamental to emphasize the spirit of liberty that cashiered a Catholic king and his Catholic family. That is what Adams did.

  This line of separation, between the Irish establishmentarian and the New England dissenter is connected with their view of the western tradition of political thought.  Burke began his career with a “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.” Burke’s politics tended to the proto-Romantic attention to aesthetics that start indicated. I also suspect, and have argued elsewhere, that Burke recognized that embrace of culture, heritage, prescription, memory and the like was prudent tool for a legislator in the Britain of his day. These guidelines were not universal truths. 

On the other side of 1776 Adams had a much stronger tendency to system than did Burke. Adams, after all, was self consciously trying to play the role of the Legislator rather than upholding a constitution already in place. I cannot find where Ryerson uses the term “provincial republicanism” to describe Adams’ thought. I do see Adams’ comment in his Novanglus essays of 1774 and 1775 that Massachusettensis (Adams’ legal sparring partner in these essays) says that “the whigs erected a provincial democracy, or republic, in the province.” That is how Adams saw Massachusetts before the revolution, and, to a degree afterward. But the traditionalism of that republic was one grounded deeply in the Puritan covenanting tradition, and thus drawing on explicit voluntary commitment much more than Burke’s appeal to historical guidance.

In the Constitution Adams drafted for Massachusetts in 1779, which the people of the state ratified on a popular, town by town basis (in which all adults males were involved, even those who that under very constitution would not be able to vote for state offices) the Preamble explains the process: “The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.” Each New England town would be constructed much the same way. If there is an Adamsian “little platoon,” to use Burke’s formulation, it was a town built upon such covenant. Massachusetts towns retained a church establishment under their new state constitution, but Adams was not himself happy with that. He knew the people of Massachusetts were unlikely to ratify a constitution without at least town-by-town establishment, but he himself regarded even such local establishments as an infringement on basic liberty.

In early 1776 Adams was the central man in Congress on the independence side. It is no surprise that several colleagues asked him for his advice about how to create new colonial/ state governments. One of the letters Adams wrote up was published as “Thoughts on Government.” It concludes with a peroration:

You and I, my dear friend, have been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election of government, more than of air, soil, or climate, for themselves or their children! When, before the present epoch, had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?

Burke would not have celebrated the opportunity to choose a form of government, rather than merely trying to minimize the defects of the old one.

To be sure, Adams was not claiming that Americans could create a whole new world for themselves, as Paine famously argued. Habit being a force of its own, the American constitutions had to work off pre-revolutionary models. Adams thought the existing colonial constitutions had much good in them. Thanks to that good foundation, Americans had a responsibility to build as wisely as possible. Adams published the first volume of his Defence of the Constitution as the Constitutional Convention was getting set to meet. In the Preface he noted that America was different. “The people in America have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number, since the transgression of the first pair; if they betray their trust, their guilt will merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the indignation of Heaven.”

The judgments Adams and others had to make about what to change and how to change, what to keep and how to keep it were based, in his case, upon a deep study of history. Adams was not studying history as mere memory—the turn to “memory” among academic historians like Ryerson is based on the presumption that human character is fundamentally fluid, and it is shaped by a concatenation of events and developments over history. Adams used history extensively to push back against that characterization of man.  Adams recognized that change happens, and what we now call cultures exist, and sometimes statesmen can guide such development. But any such cultural development has parameters set by a robust human nature. Indeed, one of the fundamental lessons Adams wished to teach by quoting a thousand pages of examples in his Defence was that human nature is much more robust than modern philosophers, notably Rousseau in his Second Discourse, would like to admit.

That is why C. Bradley Thompson is not wrong to highlight two sets of principles in Adams—“the principles of liberty” and “the principles of political architecture.” He is quoting a letter John wrote his cousin Sam Adams in 1790: “Are there any principles of political architecture? What are they? Were Voltaire and Rousseau masters of them? Are their disciples acquainted with them? Locke taught them principles of liberty. But I doubt whether they have not yet to learn the principles of government.” For Adams, both sets of principles are important. But neither is sufficient by itself.

This was not the case for Burke. The principles of liberty Adams believed were fundamental to politics were exactly those Burke worried the French Revolution would bring to Britain. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, he enumerated the dangerous doctrine as follows:

that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights…

1. "To choose our own governors."

2. "To cashier them for misconduct."

3. "To frame a government for ourselves."

This new, and hitherto unheard-of bill of rights, though made in the name of the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their faction only. The body of the people of England have no share in it. 

Yet these were the very rights Adams celebrated explicitly in his “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” and implicitly in his tribute to Cromwell.  What was a “faction” in Britain was the mainstream in British North America.

It is not that Burke denied the existence of rights per se. He noted that “In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles the First, called the Petition of Right, the Parliament says to the king, "Your subjects have inherited this freedom": claiming their franchises, not on abstract principles, "as the rights of men," but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers.” 

Yet here again, Adams disagrees. Although he cherished the rights enjoyed by Englishmen and honored England’s tradition of liberty, he denied that it ceased to apply at the English channel or Atlantic coast. What was 1776 about, after all? It was about the British forcing the colonists to chose between their national identity as British subjects and the rights of Englishmen. Forced to assert their rights contrary to the dictates of the British government, the rights of Englishmen became the rights of men.  

This was not a radical innovation. It was already common before 1776 to recognize that the Rights of Englishmen were good largely because they were an approximation of natural rights, not just because they were ancestral. When the Americans made revolution, in other words, they were sowing in soil that was already rather different and better prepared for that turn than was English soil, as Adams recognized.  

Lucchese finds that “Adams admired our Constitution because he felt it was the best particular expression of the universal moral imagination.”  Adams believed that morality was central to constitutional design, but, as he noted in Thoughts on Government, “the divine science of politics is the science of social happiness, and the blessings of society depend entirely on the constitutions of government.”  After the fashion of Aristotle, Adams suggested the political character and the form of the regime tend to coincide.  Burke, stuck with a sovereign parliament, could hardly emphasize that element of politics.  Hence his quasi-Romantic streak took the place of the more classical political science of American founders like Adams.  

Great Britain and the United States were both created out of elements found in post-Reformation England. But the division across the water was significant. By the time of the American Revolution we were divided by more than a common language. That division in the understanding of religion, rights, and the basis of political institutions is part of the reason the Revolution happened. 

Burke lamented, though he came to accept, that outcome. Adams celebrated it. From July 1776, by contrast, John Adams expected that we would have an annual festival to celebrate declaring independence. That’s our tradition. It’s the tradition Adams was self-consciously working with and fostering in his work as a constitution writer and as a political theorist. It connected the universal principles of the rights of men with the particular character of the American community, a community explicitly based upon consent and the rights of men. Hence the “liberty under law” that Kirk describes. 

On the other side of the water, Burke downplayed the Revolution of 1688, and stressed continuity, seeking to teach the newly sovereign Parliament lessons in self-restraint. The means of doing so became conservative traditionalism. Hence Kirk’s “Politics of Prescription.” Both approaches are honorable and influential, but they are not the same. In considering the careers and major writings of Burke and Adams we see commonalities of the English speaking peoples, but there is an ocean of difference between British and American politics and political culture that our greatest conservative statesmen understood.

Richard Samuelson is an Associate Professor of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus. Dr. Samuelson is an historian of the American founding and of American politics and constitutional thought.