![]() The letters he wrote in response helped form the basis of his Thoughts on Government, which appeared as a pamphlet in Philadelphia and, months later, in Boston. This question weighed on William Hooper (1742–1790) and John Penn (1740–1788), Continental Congress delegates from North Carolina, when they asked Adams to share his thoughts. How best to account for people’s capacity for vice when constructing governments designed to protect individuals’ rights and promote their virtue? His understanding of human nature made him wary that people might use government to promote their own interests at the expense of others and bolster their own power to the detriment of others. ![]() Like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or Abigail Adams’s startling suggestion that members of Congress “remember the ladies,” John Adams’s Thoughts on Government revealed an optimistic sense of possibility.īut Adams was not optimistic about all things. ![]() ![]() The first half of 1776-a no man’s land between inclusion in the British empire and American independence-provided a fertile environment for the cultivation of new ideas as well as the grafting of traditional practices to new circumstances. ![]()
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