ADAMS, JOHN (1735-1826), jurist and senator, of New England (q.v.), trained to the law at the province's own inns of court and returned by his native circuit to the Commonwealth's Senate at intervals through the last three decades of the last century. He made his name first as counsel rather than as a legislator, arguing, in a series of provincial causes this contributor's colleagues in the law still cite for the clarity of their reasoning rather than for any particular generosity of temper in their author, the standing of the New England fisheries against the enumeration duties of the Navigation System (q.v.) — causes he lost, on the whole, rather more often than he won, a record his own private letters attribute with some asperity to the bench rather than to the argument.
His more durable contribution was made after he left active practice: a series of pamphlets and, latterly, a single substantial treatise comparing the constitutional arrangements of the Second Frame (q.v.) and the Third Frame (q.v.) province by province, weighing the merits of binding provincial instruction against the freer practice the cable and the Third Frame between them made possible. The treatise found no great popular readership at its printing, its argument being addressed rather to the Senate's own committee rooms than to the general subscriber, but it is still consulted, on this contributor's own enquiry among the Rota's clerks, by every committee charged with drafting an amendment to the Frame's provincial articles, which is as much practical influence as most constitutional writing of that decade can fairly claim to have kept.
He sat in the Senate himself for two further terms in his sixties, chiefly on the Committee of the Plantations, was not by his own or any other account a notably persuasive speaker on the floor, and retired finally to his own farm in New England, where he died in 1826, a jurist of solid reputation whose name this Commonwealth keeps, so far as it keeps it at all, on the strength of a treatise rather more read by committee clerks than by the wider public it was nominally addressed to. (E. H. V.)