Primary Source: Theophilus Parsons, *The Essex Result*

With independence came the need to draw up new American governments. Most states wrote their constitutions in 1776, but the process was delayed in a few states, including Massachusetts. When its legislature—the General Court—finally proposed a constitution to the state’s towns in 1778, it was rejected. Those who voted against it objected to the proposed constitution’s content, but also the fact that it had been drafted by a sitting legislature rather than a special convention.

Nowhere was the analysis of the constitution’s defects more incisively drawn than The Essex Result. To conduct an initial evaluation, a collection of Essex County towns convened a county convention to assess the constitution. The Essex Result summarized its proceedings.

Theophilus Parsons, a young lawyer from Newburyport who later would serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, is credited as the document’s author. Among The Essex Result’s most striking arguments was its defense of bicameralism.

The constitutions written in 1776 vested enormous power in their lower houses of assembly, with Pennsylvania’s going so far as to do away with its upper house entirely. The Essex Result reflected an alternative perspective, one that viewed popular legislative authority with equal suspicion to other kinds of power and would undergird the next constitution to be proposed in Massachusetts in 1780, which this time would be approved.

All men are born equally free. The rights they possess at their births are equal, and of the same kind. Some of those rights are alienable, and may be parted with for an equivalent. Others are unalienable and inherent, and of that importance, that no equivalent can be received in exchange. Sometimes we shall mention the surrendering of a power to controul our natural rights, which perhaps is speaking with more precision, than when we use the expression of parting with natural rights—but the same thing is intended. . . .

It has been observed, that each individual parts with the power of controuling his natural alienable rights, only when the good of the whole requires it, he therefore has remaining, after entering into political society, all his unalienable natural rights, and a part also of his alienable natural rights, provided the good of the whole does not require the sacrifice of them. Over the class of unalienable rights the supreme power hath no controul, and they ought to be clearly defined and ascertained in a BILL OF RIGHTS, previous to the ratification of any constitution.

The bill of rights should also contain the equivalent every man receives, as a consideration for the rights he has surrendered. This equivalent consists principally in the security of his person and property, and is also unassailable by the supreme power: for if the equivalent is taken back, those natural rights which were parted with to purchase it, return to the original proprietor, as nothing is more true, than that Allegiance and protection are reciprocal. …