The Massachusetts constitution was written much later than the other revolutionary state constitutions, and thus it avoids some of the earlier mistakes. The executive is stronger, with a limited veto; the senate is more formidable; and the judiciary is independent.

[John Adams' writings] had indicted the United States for slavishly copying the English constitution by erecting bicameral legislatures in their state constitutions, most drafted in 1776.

[John] Adams was arguing that a separate social order existed that needed to be embodied in senates and his fellow Americans could not accept this and accused him rightly of being obsessed with the English constitution.

[John Adams] experience with the French philosophers only convinced him further of the need for a bicameral legislature representing the two principal social orders and, equally important, an independent executive.

After [Tomas] Jefferson's defeat of [John] Adams in the presidential election of 1800, they didn't communicate with one another for more than a decade.

Again and again [Tomas] Jefferson deftly sidesteps many of [John] Adams's often provocative remarks. They both felt the correspondence, which was written for posterity, was too important to risk by being too candid with one another.

[John] Adams's perception of Europe, and especially France, was clearly different than [Tomas] Jefferson's. For Jefferson, the luxury and sophistication of Europe only made American simplicity and virtue appear dearer. For Adams, by contrast, Europe represented what America was fast becoming - a society consumed by luxury and vice and fundamentally riven by a struggle between rich and poor, gentlemen and commoners.