Paine and George Godfrey were chosen as the Taunton representatives to the constitutional convention which met at Cambridge on Sept. 1, 1779, to devise a new frame of government for the province (RTP Diary, Sept. 1, 1779). The matter of a new governing document for Massachusetts had been discussed as early as 1776 (see Benjamin Kent to RTP, Nov. 18, 1776, RTP 3:322–323), and in the winter of 1777–1778 a legislative convention proposed a new constitution, but it was overwhelmingly rejected by local town meetings across the province. The task was next assigned to the popularly elected convention created in the autumn of 1779. Along with the attorney general, all the justices of the Superiour Court were elected from their respective towns together with a wide-ranging cross section of the province.

From the larger convention, a committee of thirty-one were chosen to draft the constitution. One or two delegates from each county plus four delegates-at-large formed the committee, which included Paine and Rev. Samuel West of Dartmouth representing Bristol County, and James Bowdoin, John Adams, Theophilus Parsons, James Sullivan, and David Sewall. Paine’s activities at the convention fell into several different areas. Along with Judge Sargeant and Theophilus Parsons, Paine was chosen to study the twelfth article of the proposed declaration of rights, which concerned the rights of prisoners. As finally accepted the article read:

Art. XII — No subject shall be held to answer for any crime of offence, until the same is fully and plainly, substantially and formally, described to him. He cannot be compelled to accuse himself, or to furnish evidence against himself; and every subject shall have a right to be fully heard in his defence, by himself or his council, at his election; to meet the witnesses againt him face to face; to produce all proofs that may be favourable to him; to require a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the country, without whose consent, or his own voluntary confession, he cannot finally be declared guilty, or sentence to loss of life, liberty or property.

Paine also served on a committee to consider amendments to Article III, concerning the support of public worship, but their report was “largely debated.” Determining that required payment for support of religious worship was “necessary to the preservation of civil society,” the eventual article provided that rates collected under this act could be applied to “the support of the teacher or teachers of” any rate-payer’s “own religious denomination, if there be such whose ministry he attends upon”; otherwise the taxes went to the town parish. The other committees with which Paine was directly involved recommended the regularization of senatorial elections; the abolition of the old Court of General Session of the Peace and annexing its business to the Court of Common Pleas; a determination on “who are, or shall be deemed subjects of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts”; and finally a further convention to ratify the proposed constitution. Other articles adopted which directly affected Paine himself were the prohibition of various civil officers—including judges, registers of deeds and probate, and the attorney general—from serving in either house of the legislature; and the decision that thereafter the office of attorney general would be made an appointment of the governor with the approval of the Council, rather than by act of the House of Representatives (Journal of the Convention for Framing a Constitution of Government for the State of Massachusetts Bay [Boston, 1832], 27, 38, 40, 72–73, 83, 104, 107, 161).

Timothy Danielson (1733–1791) was a native of Brimfield, Mass., and a 1756 graduate of Yale. He served his native town, county, and province in positions running from town clerk to member of the Provincial Congresses. In the military he served as colonel and later brigadier general with the provincial militia and as colonel of the 2d Massachusetts Regiment (later designated as the 8th and still later the 18th) during the Revolution. Although twice elected to the Continental Congress (1780 and 1783), he failed to take his seat either time. In 1783 he was appointed to the Court of Common Pleas for Hampshire County, eventually becoming its chief justice (Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 14:9–14).

Rev. Henry Cumings (1739–1823) graduated from Harvard in 1760, and in 1763 was ordained as minister of the First Church of Billerica (Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 14:574–583).

Rev. Samuel West (1729/30–1807) of Dartmouth, identified in vol. 2.

Samuel Barrett (1738/9–1798) graduated from Harvard in 1757, worked in the family merchant business in Boston, and was secretary to both the committee which drafted the new state constitution and the convention which ratified it. In 1789 he became a justice of the Court of Common Pleas for Suffolk County (Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 14:135–142).