[American Revolution]: [Adams, John]:

$75,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

BY THE GREAT AND GENERAL COURT OF THE COLONY OF MASSACHUSETT'S-BAY. A PROCLAMATION. THE FRAILTY OF HUMAN NATURE, THE WANTS OF INDIVIDUALS, AND THE NUMEROUS DANGERS WHICH SURROUND THEM, THROUGH THE ... An extraordinary broadside printing of a proclamation written by John Adams and other members of a joint committee of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the Massachusetts Council in the immediate wake of the publication of Common Sense, asserting that the power of government rests with the people, insisting on the right of the people to overthrow a tyrannical government, and brazenly concluding with the rejoinder "God Save the People" rather than the usual "God Save the King." In both rhetoric and form, the proclamation "eloquently foreshadows the Declaration of Independence," which John Adams, as a member of the "Committee of Five," would help draft some six months later (Lowance & Bumgardner). As the editors of the Adams Family Correspondence note, "This remarkable document linked the ideas of government by consent, the obligation to resist tyranny, the propriety of Massachusetts' organizing its own government, and the necessity to preserve and promote 'the Means of Education,…Piety and Virtue,' and exemplary social order—ideas that were all to reappear in JA's draft and the adopted version of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780." "Unlike the more secular Declaration, however, the broadside reflected the powerful Puritan tradition in Massachusetts Bay," invoking "Pie

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