John Adams, Mosaic Law and the Boston Massacre Trial Against the Backdrop of English Royal Revisions of New England Puritan Law, 1640–1800

Having provided essential background and context in Europe, from the Reformation period on, this chapter opens with a personal glimpse of John Adams’ own views on Mosaic and broader biblical law as glimpsed through the personal reflections he offers in his diary as a young law student, some twenty years prior to the Boston Massacre Trial. The chapter then goes on to detail the debates over English royal versus Mosaic-based Puritan laws of capital punishment which erupted within the trial as part of the legal defense, in which Adams participated, and the pronouncement of the residing judges. With the particular points of debate within the trial in view, the chapter then delves into the historical outworking of the prior debates over Mosaic Law within the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the closely related colony of Connecticut, in comparison with Catholic Maryland and other select colonies, in order to elucidate the long history of struggle between Puritan Mosaic-based versus English Anglican-royal legal traditions from the mid-seventeenth century down to the Boston Massacre Trial debates. That history involves English religious-political history as it stood in relation to the history of struggles both with and within the Colony. With (1) Adams’s own personal reflections on Mosaic and broader biblical law in his youthful idealist days studying law, (2) his later participation in the Boston Massacre Trial debates, and (3) the New England legal history behind those debates all in the backdrop, the chapter closes with John Adams then writing a personal letter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the eve of the American Revolution in 1775, five years after the Boston Massacre Trial. At heart, the letter presents a hypothetical struggle among a community over proper understandings and applications of the Ten Commandments to their daily lives. The allegory appears to reflect and even draw from Puritan New England legal history. Regardless of how Adam’s allegory is interpreted, however, the history behind the trial, inclusive of Adams’ own personal participation in that history, remains etched in the American annals and serves as a foundational part of the present study.