History
An earlier draft by the Massachusetts General Court was rejected by the people due to lack of public participation. Subsequently, in the summer of 1779, delegates were elected to a constitutional convention, which met in Cambridge in September 1779. The convention chose a committee of thirty members to prepare a new constitution and declaration of rights.
To write a new constitution, the committee of thirty members appointed a subcommittee consisting of James Bowdoin, Samuel Adams, and John Adams. That subcommittee in turn assigned the task of preparing a first draft to John Adams alone, a "sub-sub committee of one," as Adams later referred to it. For the new declaration of rights, the committee of thirty members assigned the drafting directly to John Adams. However, the article on religion was referred to clergy. Perhaps the most famous line in Adams's draft declaration of rights was this: "All men are born equally free and independent...." This was slightly revised before being adopted by the constitutional convention: "All men are born free and equal...."
Male voters 21 years or older ratified the constitution, including the declaration of rights, that was proposed by the convention. At the insistence of John Adams, the document referred to the state as a "commonwealth."
Read more about this topic: Massachusetts Constitution
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)