American Founding -- The Untold Story of Our Constitution

September 17 is Constitution Day. The delegates formally began their great adventure on May 25, 1787, when they had a quorum and formal start of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. For almost four months, delegates from 12 of the 13 states debated a new frame of government to replace the Confederation. General George Washington served as president of the Convention. On September 17, 1787, they finished the first phase of their work. The second phase, ratification, would prove to be as difficult and divisive as the Convention. The following essay served as the basis of several talks I delivered on the U.S. Constitution during the spring and summer of 2011.

Our National Story

The story we Americans tell about ourselves is not carved in stone but is revised from time to time. One of the best ways to detect rewrites of our national story is to examine the way we talk about the U.S. Constitution and the convention that produced it. Since the founding of our country, there have been at least five major rewrites of the meaning of the Constitution and the convention in which it was created.

(1) Great Men  Americans born after the framers did their work lived during the Romantic Age. The temper of the age cultivated the belief that the founders were indeed the “assembly of demigods” that Thomas Jefferson claimed they were in 1787. In the 1840s the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle expressed the Romantic theory of history in his famous utterance, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." You can see the hero-worship in young Abraham Lincoln. His lyceum speech of 1838, delivered when he was 28 years of age, was informed by Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory of history. Lincoln emphasized the “towering genius” of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, and the other men who produced the Constitution, calling them “a forest of giant oaks,” “pillars of the temple of liberty.” His generation, by contrast, lived in an age of decline that would likely not measure up unless some great test challenged them to rise (such as a civil war?). Otherwise, the best they could do would be to show “reverence for the Constitution and its laws.”

(2) Great Nation  After the Civil War and Reconstruction, Americans rewrote the narrative of the Constitutional Convention to emphasize our common national story since Pilgrim Rock. The need was to knit the nation back together after such a terrible trauma that took the lives of 626,000 men in the North, South, and West. The Great Nation narrative avoided saying too much about the slavery debates that almost tore the Convention of 1787 apart. Rather, it honored the patriotic delegates from North and South who, despite regional differences, came together to create the greatest fundamental law in human history. It is what a nation in need of healing needed to hear.

(3) Great Con Job  Then a landmark book came along in 1913 – during the so-called Progressive Era – that emphasized the economics of the founding and the economic motives of the founders. Written by Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States argued that our frame of government grew out of the reactionary phase of the American Revolution. The Constitution reflected the class interests of propertied delegates who met in Philadelphia in 1787. The result was a shrewd maneuver by selfish men of wealth bent on keeping the middling sort and poorer classes at bay. The propertied class protected their interests by setting up legal guardrails against the democratic excesses let loose in 1776.

(4) Great Debate  By the time I was an undergraduate, Beard’s work had been overturned by R. E. Brown, Forrest McDonald, and historians working in the spirit of John G. A. Pocock, who went back to the archives and saw that the framers were not merely protecting their class interests, but that they had a more disinterested goal in mind: to found an enduring republic, the greatest republican empire the world had ever known. They were unsure of how successful their experiment would be. A basic question they asked was, Does republican self-government rest on the virtue of the people or on the formal political institutions that channel and control human behavior? The Federalists trusted human nature enough to go forward with the bold experiment of a large republic with a strong national government based on republican principles. The Anti-federalists, on the other hand, so distrusted human weakness and our propensity to corruption that they shuddered at the prospect of putting powerful political instruments in the hands of a few. The Constitutional Convention amounted to a great debate over the prospects of various forms of republican government in the modern age.

(5) Great Crimes  That republican rewrite has begun to fade from the scene, and students today are taught mostly about the crimes and sins of the framers who debated and wrote the Constitution. Indeed, they know more about their shortcomings than any previous generation. Many of you no doubt have heard about the brouhaha surrounding the President’s House in Philadelphia. It’s where George Washington lived from 1790-1797. The house, just a short walk from Independence Hall, is presented as a prison for nine slaves that George and Martha kept. As one reviewer for the Denver Post wrote about the site, “Washington is exposed…. The first president’s reputation is savaged….Washington was mean and selfish and worked tirelessly to defend slavery.”

The human drama that arises out of hypocrisy makes a history syllabus more interesting, to be sure, but it does not push discussion very far if other important lessons are neglected. Our students should be learning that, without George Washington and the Constitution he championed, fearless critiques of our Founding Father might not be possible. Students should be learning that, without the Constitution, they would not have the ability to pursue happiness the way they want. They should be learning that, without the Constitution, most of their pop culture icons would not have the freedom of expression to entertain them as they do. In short, we are the freest people on earth. None of our students are going to jail because of their beliefs or manner of expression -- which is extremely unusual in the perspective of world history. 

The Greatest Story Never Told
(in Today's Classrooms)

The Constitution of 1787 is one of the greatest documents ever drawn up by human beings. In fact, because it does such a good job of preserving freedom, we are free to ignore it.

As a history teacher, I say this with irony, of course. Every year, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia conducts a survey to find out how well Americans know their Constitution. What’s our narrative these days? Sadly, nowadays there is not much of any narrative. A few years back, the survey asked teenagers to compare their knowledge of the Constitution with their knowledge of pop culture:

-    3/5 know the names of the Three Stooges, but only 2/5 can name the three branches of government;

-    ¾ know which city has the zip code 90210, but only ¼ know the city in which the Constitution was written;

-    4/5 can tell you how many members the most popular rock bands have, but only 1/5 can tell you how many U.S. Senators currently serve on Capitol Hill.

Looking at the results of the survey, Dr. Richard Beeman, a professor of early American history at Penn, opined that our system of republican government “came with no guarantees. Not in 1787, and not today. They knew that the new republic would require active, informed citizen involvement to preserve, protect, and defend it.”

Today the Constitution may be the greatest story never told to our children, and this should unsettle us all. Kids may be only 25 percent of our population, but they 100 percent of our future. How do I hook college freshmen on the American founding and lay the groundwork for them to know more about the Constitution and to spend a lifetime exploring it?

1. Dramatis Personae -- What a Piece of Work Are Men!

First, I draw students into the very human story of the Constitutional Convention because they don't have a good sense of who these men were. The cast of characters comprises the greatest generation of political talent ever. Historians like to jest that they lived in the "Age of Marble," but of course they're not marble statues, cold and inaccessible. They were human and deeply flawed. Some of them drank too much (Luther Martin), some had illegitimate children (Benjamin Franklin), some were adulterers (Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris), some owned slaves (George Washington and James Madison), and some were so irascible (John Adams) they could hardly get along with others. Yet these men with complicated private lives worked together and performed heroically for the commonweal. They inspire us -- flawed though we are -- to do no less. 

2. The Confederation -- a Time of Troubles

Since learning from the mistakes of the past is important, I expose students to the troubled circumstances that led to the Constitutional Convention. In truth, it came about because of one of the most powerful engines of historical change -- frustration; the Annapolis convention of 1786 had failed to address adequately the economic difficulties among the states. The Convention also came about because of another powerful engine of historical action -- self-preservation; Shays's Rebellion demonstrated that republican liberty is threatened not only when government is too strong, but also when government is too weak.

The nation that succeeded in breaking away from the British Empire seemed more unified by the color on maps than by its culture, society, politics, or economy. Do you know that there had been eight attempts to pull British North America into some kind of greater union together before the Convention of 1787? So the fruit of the framers' efforts -- "a more perfect union" -- was an amazing feat.

Consider the political difficulties. Initially the Second Continental Congress was without constitutional authority. It was little more than a conference of ambassadors from the 13 states. The Articles of Confederation were eventually ratified during the War for Independence. Many regarded them as the “Articles of Confusion" because of their numerous shortcomings.

It is always hard to launch a new government; doubly so to launch a new type of government. The United States was a republic in a world of monarchies. Actually, we were 13 republics. And make no mistake: These 13 republics were sovereign, coining their own money, raising their own armies and navies, erecting their own tariff barriers, and even fashioning their own foreign policies. The legislature of Virginia, for example, separately ratified the 1778 treaty of alliance with France. New York and Vermont almost went to war over their border. Several of the states were engaged in trade wars with one another. The potential chaos went far to convince Americans that too weak a national government is just as much a treat to liberty as too strong a national government. 

Economically the times were among the most difficult Americans have ever faced. The country's war debts oppressed each of the 13 states; the possibility of default was real. Moreover, 1786 was the worst year of a depressed economy. British North America's coveted commerce with the Mother Country had been reserved for loyal parts of the Empire during the war. After the war, British manufacturers had inventory that they dumped on the American market at cheap prices, thereby pulling the rug out from under new American manufacturing. The economic suffering manifested itself when a patriot, Daniel Shays, led a revolt of farmers in western Massachusetts that revealed all the frayed edges around the status quo.

Socially there were strains. The stabilizing Tory elements had fled to Canada during the war. Thirteen diverse colonies lost some of the glue that held them together during the war. And Shays’s Rebellion revealed just how much many farmers resented the merchants and shippers on the coast.

Despite the difficulties of these times, it is also important to give the Confederation its due. The 1780s saw a lot of good, but the good it did has largely passed out of our communal memory. For instance, the Confederation Congress passed one of the greatest pieces of legislation ever, the Land Ordinance of 1785, which provided that the acreage should be sold and the proceeds used to pay off the national debt – a principle that would apply throughout the 19^th century until the closing of the frontier. (This explains why the U.S. didn’t have an income tax till after the frontier was closed and the federal government had sold off most of our public lands.) The Land Ordinance also provided that future land rushes be effectively accommodated with an orderly surveying system, and it provided that the 16^th section of each township be sold to fund public education – a stroke of genius in the early republic and one of the glories of this Congress. 

Perhaps most significant of all, in its twilight the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 – part of our organic law – which championed freedom by outlawing slavery in the new lands being settled. And to its everlasting credit, it averted a future civil war by handling the western lands with wisdom. There was no doubt that the new republic would eventually become the world's greatest empire, but the West would have to be "won" with wisdom. New states, new republics, would not be subordinated to the original states, but be admitted on an equal footing. In this measure is embedded an important history lesson. The founders knew that the peace of the Roman Republic and Empire had been disturbed repeatedly by the unequal treatment of outlying provinces -- in part those disturbances were the undoing of the republic. The American Republic could not become a great empire if it repeated Rome's crippling mistakes. [See J. Rufus Fears, "Julius Caesar in History," in Life Lessons from the Great Myths (Chantilly, VA: Teaching Company, 2011), lecture 27.]

It is important to keep the Confederation Congress in mind when considering the Constitutional Convention. Both bodies of patriots were meeting at the same time in the summer of 1787, the former in New York City, and the latter in Philadelphia. Both -- both -- built the architecture of freedom that we enjoy to this day.

3. The Convention 

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was one of the most extraordinating meetings of all time, a turning point in history. As Pepperdine government professor Gordon Lloyd sees it, what happened between May 25 and September 17 was a drama in four acts. Delegates tried various proposals on for size -- the Virginia Plan, New Jersey Plan, and Connecticut Compromise -- until a workable institutional mix was found for the new republic. None of the framers thought that they had conjured up the ideal commonwealth. The Constitution that emerged out of the debates was a mish-mash of compromises -- the best they thought they could produce under the circumstances.

Could it fly? The convention was not entirely kosher, and Anti-federalists pushed the point hard in Philadelphia and in the ratification debates that followed. Delegates had been sent to Philadelphia by the states to revise the Articles of Confederation, not to produce an entirely new frame of government. But the latter is what the Federalists pushed for and got. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Gouverneur Morris -- from day one, they made the Convention an extraconstitutional gathering. Rhode “Rogue” Island was so wary of the enterprise that they never sent delegates to participate in the framing of a new constitution.

The delegates in convention and in the ratification debates that followed had tedius, exhausting discussions over the institutional mechanics of a modern republic. They grappled with the specifics of how power should be (1) divided among three branches of government checking and balancing each other, and (2) attenuated further by a federated polity in which the national government respected the traditional prerogatives of states and locales.

At a more philosophical level, the delegates were probing and pushing the very nature of republics. These were men of the Enlightenment who nevertheless possessed a keen sense of the historic rights as Englishmen. They not only knew the philosophy of Locke, but also the historic reality of the English Bill of Rights; not only Hume, but also Magna Carta; not only the Commonwealthmen, but also their Bible.

They put tough questions to each other. What were republics anyway? (Not just a representative democracy, which we are erroneously taught today.) Why had past republics succeeded or failed? What were the geographic limits of a republic? How were factions contained? How much executive power is too much? (Again, too weak a government is just as much a threat to liberty as too strong a government.) What about standing armies? What are the dangers of pure democracy -- and the mob -- to enduring sovereignty? What constitutes the happiness of a people? (Not just the private pursuit of pleasure, power, and profit, which we are erroneously taught today.) And -- and! -- what about the glaring ugliness of slavery in a so-called free nation?

Despite heated debates that on several occasions almost brought the Convention to an intemperate end, most of the delegates kept their tempers within the reasonable bounds of procedural debate. No one resorted to arms. The rule of law prevailed. Aristotelian prudence combined with a spirit of flexibility, compromise, and accommodation. The Convention was a major chapter in the development of the American leadership style. As Thomas Jefferson observed, “The example of changing the constitution by assembling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the [other things] we have given it.”

To make the Constitution the law of the land, the Federalists' ambitious agenda was to overcome the opposition of the Anti-federalists and get 13 republics to secede from the existing Confederation. Only eleven years earlier, the American colonies had seceded from the corrupt British Empire, and now the idea was to get them to secede from the ineffectual American confederation. That is what the hard-fought ratification debate from September 1787 to July of 1788 boiled down to. As MIT historian Pauline Maier argues in her authoritative study, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788, the ratification debates were good training for citizens in the new republic.

4. The Preamble

Toward the end of the Convention, Gouverneur Morris was tasked with creating an opening statement for the Constitution. His handiwork became the most economical lesson in political philosophy ever written --Morris condensed 2,500 years of wisdom into a few lines. Allow me to explain.

The central problem with which the Constitution grapples is power – how to order power. Since we are lower than the angels, it is prudent to disperse the powers of government. And that is precisely what the delegates to the Constitutional Convention did by creating three branches of government that could check and balance each other, and by creating a federal system that further diluted national power by respecting the prerogatives of states and traditions of locales. The resulting order of government is one of the most elegant contrivances ever wrought by the hand of man.
  

But that is not all that the Constitution does for liberty. The Founders’ understanding of the idea is strikingly harnessed in Gouverneur Morris's one sentence Preamble. Its 52 words declare:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

These ordinary words pack extraordinary meaning. Note the six aims of the Constitution, announced by the words “in order to.” The six great aims of our Constitution define the common good. They are union, justice, peace, defense, welfare, and – not just liberty – but the blessings of liberty. In that order. The ordering of the six aims is deliberate, not accidental. In these few words our Founders established the official priorities of our government. A little reflection shows that the Founders expressed their priorities in the proper sequence (and I am happy to acknowledge my debt to Michigan Chief Justice Thomas Brennan for the following observations).

     a.  Form a more perfect union.  The Founders made union or unity the first priority. There is no possibility of serving the common good unless the community is first identified and defined. It is a question of physical and social geography. There must be a jurisdiction in which the common good can be pursued and defended. Lines on the map that say: this is our community, our state, our nation. Within these boundaries, it’s all for one, and one for all.

     b.  Establish justice.  The Founders made justice the second priority. Unless a society is just, unless it is committed to render to every person what is due that person, nothing it does will be for the common good.

     c.  Insure domestic tranquility.  Domestic tranquility is the third priority, after unity and justice. Should justice be done at the cost of tranquility?  Absolutely. That’s why policemen carry guns. Peace without justice is a pax terrorem.  It is the gray streets of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.  The fact is, there can be no true and lasting peace where there is no justice.

     d.  Provide for the common defense.  The fourth priority in the Preamble is to provide for the common defense. It logically comes after union, justice, and domestic tranquility. A nation that is not unified cannot be defended. A nation that is not just should not be defended.  A nation that is not at peace with itself will not be defended against foreign aggression. Witness the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975.

     e.  Promote the general welfare.  The fifth priority is the one politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, citizen groups, and the media give most of their time and attention to: promoting the general welfare. To the Founders this did not mean welfare in the sense of relief from poverty or privation. The overwhelming majority of immigrants to America were by definition poor; the well off stayed back in the Old World. Well aware of this fact, our Founders did not call for the national government to provide assistance in the sense we understand it today. Rather, “the general welfare” is understood as legitimate public action on behalf of the common good; public expenditures for public purposes like transportation, communication, and the like – the public infrastructure people need to generate the wealth to provide for themselves, their families, and the goods and services society requires.

     f.  Secure the blessings of liberty.  Now we come to the sixth and most interesting priority set out in the Preamble – to “secure the blessings of liberty.” Two things are noteworthy. First, the word “liberty” comes last in the list of aims and priorities of our Constitution. Why? Because the other aims – union, justice, peace, defense, and the general welfare – must be realized before a people can enjoy true liberty. Is this not what Iraq and Afghanistan are teaching us today? The fact that liberty is not first tells us that the Founders realized it is a fragile achievement of civilization, hard won and easily lost. To keep liberty from being lost, it must be built on the scaffolding of other institutions. It must be guarded with vigilance and upheld by our morals, reason, and willingness to live under the rule of law.

The second thing to note comes from parsing the sentence. Grammatically, liberty is not a direct aim set forth in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution. Grammatically, the word is relegated to a prepositional phrase – the object of “blessings.”  What is going on?  

One way to interpret this wording is that liberty was a given in 1787. The Patriots had won back their ancient rights as Englishmen. The new republic was free; its citizens, sovereign. The Founders had proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to liberty.  This self-evident truth was implicit in the Constitution.

Now, the wording states that the aim of the Constitution is to “secure the blessings of liberty.” If the Founders seem as interested in securing “the blessings of liberty” as in liberty itself, then it is because they viewed liberty as instrumental. It is a means, not the end – rather like money. Most people want money, not for its own sake, but for what it allows one to have: status, security, power, material comforts, and so on.  It’s not the money per se but the blessings of money that we want.

By analogy, the grammatical treatment of liberty in the Preamble suggests that the Founders viewed liberty not as an end in itself, but as the means to the end. What is the end? In a republic of virtue, the end is the good life. So liberty is good because it allows us to achieve other good things. But liberty can only be good if it is ordered – ordered by the infrastructure of surrounding institutions and also by our morals, reason, and willingness to be subject to the rule of law.

So this ennobling sentence, this Preamble of the Constitution, provides a veritable tutorial in freedom to citizens. More precisely, its 52 words drive home a lesson not just in freedom, but in ordered freedom.  Pondering the Founders’ idea of ordered freedom should give us pause about the notions of freedom most Americans hold today.

5. Results

The work of the Constitutional Convention must not have seemed very promising when delegates adjourned on September 17, 1787. Fully 16 of the 55 delegates wouldn’t even sign the document they had debated. Moreover, the nation's political elite split into two dominant parties -- Federalists vs. Antifederalists -- a pattern that has prevailed in various permutations ever since.

After ratification in 1788, the U.S. Constitution endured, although amended 27 times. Today it is not the oldest extant constitution (a distinction belonging to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), but the oldest national extant constitution.

After so many tests over the past 23 decades, the U.S. Constitution stands as the best framework in the modern world for diffusing power on the one hand, yet having a strong enough national government to address the challenges of the modern world on the other.

Significantly, the U.S. Constitution has enabled America to endure -- and even reinvent itself several times -- in the face of serious challenges:

- we resolved the issue of sovereignty and slavery in the Civil War, with what Lincoln called "a new birth of freedom";

- we morphed from an agricultural Eden into the greatest industrial power in the world;

- we absorbed the Progressive Movement without a revolution;

- we did not just survive but thrived after World War II when we faced our greatest existential threat, and our nation became the economic, political, and moral superpower of the world.

In conclusion, allow me to leave you with a counterintuitive thought. We have looked at all the ways the Constitution is at the center of a great story. Yet I've not mentioned the most important element that has helped our nation survive -- the most important reason that our Constitution serves us generation after generation: It is because of our nation's unwritten constitution. America's unwritten constitution is composed of the habits of a free and virtuous people who cherish ordered liberty under the rule of law. Our unwritten constitution is found in citizens who balance rights and duties. The unwritten constitution exists where a people jealously guard the just treatment of fellow citizens: equal justice under law. These elements ultimately derive from a culture that traces back to Angles, Saxons, and Germanic tribes of the Middle Ages. Indeed, our politics work because of our long culture of ordered freedom. So long as America remembers her cultural roots, then we should be all right politically. And that's a story that should be told over and over and over again.

American Founding -- Top Ten

The professor in me is always curious to discover what a class finds most memorable -- what nuggets will they carry with them long after our course together ends? By way of review, I surveyed my OLLI class at Aquinas College during the last meeting (May 19, 2011), asking them what they most enjoyed learning in "The Amazing American Revolution." More than 50 students participated in polishing these nuggets.

10. Don't believe everything you hear on cable TV. Most commentators don't know the founding well at all. To get a better grasp of what Gordon Wood calls "the most important event in American history, bar none," it's useful to correct some misconceptions.

    



Misinformation began early in the republic's history. This painting is typical in that it depicts the founders as unified statesmen possessing calm resolve. Yet at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, 16 delegates would not even sign the document they had debated. This 1856 painting by Junius Brutus Stearns -- titled "Washington as a Statesman" -- shows the General addressing the Constitutional Convention. It is at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. By the way, Washington spoke only once at the Convention, toward the end of the deliberations.


• Despite assertions to the contrary by some cable TV commentators and pols, the founders were a diverse lot when it came to religion, philosophy, and politics. That's why the question -- What would the founders do? -- is tricky. True, they shared the conviction that King George III and Lord North had violated the English constitution to an unconscionable degree. Applying the principles of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, they agreed to throw off the British Crown (though some were willing to crown George Washington in his stead). They also subscribed to the idea of "ordered liberty" more than we do. Beyond that, the founders could not even agree on what the American republic should look like. 16 of the delegates to the Constitutional convention refused to sign the document. Splitting up into Federalists and Antifederalists, most of the former championed a commercial republic (Hamilton); many of the latter, an agrarian republic (Jefferson).... You could hardly find two more diverse leaders than John Dickinson and Sam Adams. The intellectual antipathy between John Adams and Tom Paine was palpable.... Perhaps it was precisely the tensions among them that led the founders to become the greatest generation of statesmen ever.

The most famous duel in American history: Aaron Burr, our sitting vice president, killed Alexander Hamilton, our first treasury secretary, in Weehawken, NJ, on July 11, 1804.

• It is mistaken to think that the founders basically got along well with one another. Some wore white hats; some wore black hats. Like the rest of us, they nursed resentments, held grudges, and had knock-down-drag-outs. Recall: a sitting vice president shot and killed the first secretary of the treasury in a duel. George and Martha Washington felt personally betrayed by Jefferson.... Then there's John Adams, who had a plethora of apparent foibles. He could not stand Thomas Paine. He poked fun of John Dickinson for hiding behind the skirts of his Quaker wife and mother-in-law. He envied the credit George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson received for the founding. By the Election of 1800, Adams and Jefferson were not even on speaking terms. Each of these "statesmen" had mobilized partisan newspapers to write such scurrilous things about the other that it is a miracle they ever restored their friendship. The campaign rhetoric in 1800 was much more vicious than anything you see today, even on cable TV.




Ever wonder how Gouverneur Morris lost his left leg?


• It is also mistaken to think that all the founders were buckled-shoe Puritans in their private lives. Several of our statesmen were not "family values" people at all. Luther Martin was such a lush that historians like Gordon Lloyd joke that it would be more accurate to call him "Luther Martini." Gouverneur Morris's many affairs on both sides of the Atlantic -- including sharing Talleyrand's mistress -- gives new meaning to the idea of (to use his words in the Preamble) "domestic tranquility." While Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton had a notorious affair with the financially desperate Maria Reynolds, making him vulnerable to bribery. (As Hamilton himself later confessed, "I took the bill out of my pocket and gave it to her. Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable").... In his Autobiography Benjamin Franklin admitted he frequently visited prostitutes; moreover, he was not very considerate of his wife Deborah, abandoning her for long periods of time; and he refused to reconcile with his son when he declared with the Tories. George Washington was still flirting with Sally Fairfax after his engagement to Martha. Washington's famous will, in which he released his slaves (the only founder to do so), certainly betrays mixed motives upon closer inspection. Thomas Jefferson was not only accused of sleeping with his teenage slave, Sally Hemings, but also with trying to seduce his neighbor's wife, Betsy Walker. The sins and peccadillos of our founders would fill an Everest of People magazines.... But that's okay. It is important to see the founders as they were. They were not marble statues, cold and unapproachable and inaccessible. When we bring them down from Mt. Olympus, when we see them as they were, warts and all, we can respect them all the more as flawed humans who nevertheless accomplished much good.... Plus, we can identify with them. If these flawed human beings were capable of such heroic personal sacrifice in the service of a greater good, then perhaps we really can follow in their footsteps and expect better from ourselves.

Politically, America was founded as a constitutional republic. But direct democracy was practiced in early New England town meetings. This illustration is from a civil government text used in the early 20th century.

• It is misleading to assert that America was founded as a democracy. That statement is only partially true. Constitutionally, America was founded as a republic. The populist element in our early history was situational. Ad hoc direct democracy arose on the Mayflower, in New England town meetings, and along the frontier. Moreover, our civil society, marketplace, and militias were democratically organized. The democratic principle in our culture would spill inexorably over into politics during the Progressive Era a hundred years after the founding. But the national government would not change significantly until many decades after the founding generation had passed. Strictly speaking, the national frame of government that came out of Philadelphia in 1787 was republican. A republican constitution by definition balances rule by the one (presidency), with rule by the few (Senate and Supreme Court), with rule by the many (House). America was founded as a constitutional republic. 

• I sometimes hear it said, erroneously, that America was the world's first republic. Actually there were numerous republics that preceded America. Ancient Carthage was a prominent republic that contended with Rome for control of the Mediterranean. Ancient Rome was a republic for almost 500 years. Medieval Venice was a republic for more than 1,000 years. Prior to the American Revolution, in the 17th century, the Dutch formed a powerful commercial republic, and Britain experimented with republicanism under Cromwell. It is more accurate to say that we were the modern world's first constitutional republic.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton (Maryland) was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence and the last surviving signer of the document. He was educated in Europe by the Jesuits. This serene oil painting, by Thomas Sully in 1834, fails to convey all the suffering Carroll and his family endured both as Catholics and as nation founders. Bradley Birzer's authoritative biography, American Cicero, brings to life one of the most fascinating statesman of the founding era.

• "America is a Protestant nation" -- a largely true statement at the time of the founding, but one that needs qualifying. Most citizens were indeed Protestant, but two percent of the population was Catholic and heterodox faiths abounded, as did people who professed no faith at all. In British North America there were numerous Quaker settlements, for example, and many of our foremost founders were either Unitarian (John Adams) or Deists (Jefferson, Franklin, Paine). Only once in his public life did George Washington speak the name of Jesus. (He was nominally Anglican.) Only one of the nine most prominent founders, John Jay, was a devout, orthodox, church-going Protestant during the revolutionary period. During one particularly tense session at the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin suggested that the delegates pray, to which Alexander Hamilton quipped that Americans had no need of foreign intervention. There is no question that most American settlers were Protestant, and that most of the founders were Protestant. But it is also accurate to say that a small number of prominent founders were like flying buttresses -- supportive of the church but happy outside of it.

Texas vaqueros helped win the American Revolution. This historical plaque in New Orleans commemorates the role of Spanish Governor Bernardo de Galvez in defeating the British. Galvez fed Spanish and American armies with cattle from Franciscan ranches around San Antonio, in the Spanish province of Texas.

• When speaking of the War for Independence, it is misleading to concentrate solely on the upper East Coast between, say, Fort Ticonderoga and Yorktown. To do so is to neglect other critically important theaters in the Western Hemisphere. Historically, Boston and New York publishing houses tended to focus on their own region to the neglect of (1) the Carolinas, which saw some of the heaviest fighting in the war; (2) the Caribbean, where the French navy kept most of the Royal navy pinned down; (3) the West, where George Rogers Clark subdued Britain's Indian allies, even in far-off places around Fort Detroit; (4) the Southwest, where Spanish Governor Bernardo de Galvez kept the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River cleared of the British, with even Spanish vaqueros in Texas playing a logistical role. Each theater contributed to the successful quest of the Americans who sought independence. It's not just an East Coast thing.

      Also:

• July 4th, 1776, is not technically Independence Day. As John Adams pointed out, July 2nd was the day when the Second Continental Congress voted on Richard Henry Lee's resolution (introduced on June 7, 1776) to separate from Great Britain. July 4th was the day the Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence, setting forth the rationale for the break with Britain. It was intended for both for domestic and international consumption.

• George Washington was a great man, but he was not a great battlefield general -- certainly no Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon Bonaparte. In fact, GW lost more battles than he won. His strength lay in his ability to hold a ragtag army together, his example of sacrifice, his intelligence gathering, his holding an international alliance together, and his ability to walk away from power. That is why he was great and it is why we honor him. (Even his enemy, King George III, remarked that Washington's ability to walk away from power made him "the greatest man in the world.")

A set of George Washington's dentures, obviously not made of wood. 

• George Washington did not have wooden teeth. His dentures were made of slave teeth set in ivory that were stained by tea, so they eventually looked like wood. They caused him much difficulty (stories about which prompts laughter at the expense of the Father of our Country).

• It is not true that democracies (and, by extension, representative democracies) do not go to war against one another. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant foreshadowed the "democratic peace theory" in his essay, "Perpetual Peace" (1795). Kant reasoned that a majority of the people would never vote to go to war, unless in self-defense. Therefore, if all nations were constitutional republics, international warfare would end, because there would be no aggressors. It's a bad theory refuted by history. Numerous times a body of people or their representatives have elected to go to war against each other: Athens vs. Sparta; Rome vs. Carthage; Great Britain vs. the U.S. in the War of 1812; the North vs. the South in the Civil War, and both, by the way, were the largest two democracies in the world at the time. 

9. The American War for Independence was both a civil war and a world war. It began as a civil war. A formerly united empire consisting of Englishmen loyal to the Crown split up when about 1/3rd of the colonists in British North America decided they had put up with too many abuses for too long. They justified their violent breakout in the Declaration of Independence, citing some two-dozen specific abuses.... Within three years the conflict morphed into a world war, and here the larger global context is important. England and France had fought four wars in the hundred years leading up to the American Revolution. They had scrapped in Europe, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and North America.... In 1754 a young George Washington precipitated the fourth of these wars in a glen in southwestern Pennsylvania. Britain eventually won the Seven Years War, but at a high price -- literally. The American Revolution grew out of the tensions that arose when Britain, financially strapped, taxed colonials without their consent to ease the crushing debt of empire. Patriot resistance led to the War for Independence, but Britain would end up fighting not just 13 of their former colonies, but also France, Spain, and Netherlands, all of which had scores to settle with the British.... After Saratoga, France came in on the American side hoping to humiliate the British after their own humiliation in the Seven Years War. Although France got the satisfaction of seeing Britain humiliated, her war debts, in turn, would lead to the calling of the Estates General and the outbreak of the French Revolution.... Out of the chaos of the 1790s rose Napoleon, whose wars in turn led to financial troubles that would open up the opportunity for Americans to purchase Louisiana, recently purchased by the French from Spain.... The American revolt is further linked to her former allies through the Haitian slaves who unsuccessfully attempted to break away from France and found the New World's second republic, and to all the South American republics that successfully broke away from Spain. It's all linked -- like that old toy, the barrel of monkeys. The American founding is better understood when seen in all its complex linkage to the broader world.


The neoclassical painter, John Trumbull, actually took part in the scene above, titled "The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775." The painting hangs at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.



8. The casualty rate of the Revolutionary War was much higher than anyone today realizes -- second highest of all our wars. In the Civil War, America lost almost 2 percent of her population. In the Revolutionary War (which was also a civil war), America lost almost 1 percent of her population. Out of a population of 2.5 million, the Americans lost close to 25,000 people by mortal wounds, subsequent infections, and disease.... By contrast, in World War II and the War of 1812, the U.S. lost about 1/3rd of 1 percent of her population. In World War I we lost about 1/10th of 1 percent of our population. In Vietnam we lost an even lower percentage of our population.

It was once common to depict George Washington sporting a Roman toga, symbolic of the old high Roman virtues -- labor, pietas, dignitas, gravitas, and fatum. This period piece from the 1840s, by Horatio Greenough, is part of the Smithsonian collection.

7. The American founders were latter-day Roman republicans. Many could read Latin, were classically educated, and consciously identified with some of the leading republicans of ancient Rome. They especially valued the civic virtue of the ancient Romans that made men capable of great sacrifice for others and for the community.





Cincinnatus put down his plow and took up his sword when he was called to lead Rome against tyrants. In this sculpture (in Cincinnati, OH), the republican leader is handing the fasces, symbol of constitutional authority in Rome, back to the republic's legitimate authorities. Fasces are a common symbol of republican power -- and also the origin of the word "fascist." Fasces are depicted in the U.S. House of Representatives on each side of the rostrum. 


• George Washington was alternately regarded as a Cincinnatus (for laying down his sword and returning to his plow) or Fabius the Delayer (for patiently avoiding a military catastrophe with the British). He also was a great fan of Joseph Addison's play, Cato, which he had performed again and again for his men. In both sculpture and painting, contemporaries frequently portrayed GW in a toga.
• John Adams, an attorney, looked back to the greatest lawyer of ancient times, the Roman republican Cicero, for inspiration. 
• Alexander Hamilton signed his Federalist papers with the name of the early Roman republican, Publius. There is evidence that he signed early papers "Julius Caesar."
• James Madison signed his Federalist papers with the name of the early Roman republican, Publius.
• John Jay signed his Federalist papers with the name of the early Roman republican, Publius.
• In fact, when debating the merits of the Constitution, most of the Federalists and Antifederalists used Roman noms de plume.  
• Nathan Hale's last words -- "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" -- were likely based on words from Joseph Addison's play, Cato.



In this famous sculpture of George Washington by Houdon (in the Virginia Capitol in Richmond), the General and first President of the United States rests his left hand on the fasces, symbol of Roman republican power. Fasces were composed of a bundle of rods around an axe. Compare Washington's pose with that of Cincinnatus, above, who is handing the fasces (power) back to legitimate public authorities.

• It was fashionable for earlier generations of Americans to have Roman names. Did you notice the painting of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 at the top of the page? The artist's name is Junius Brutus Stearns (1810-1885).

6. The American Revolution and founding should be chronologically and spatially s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d, seen as (1) beginning much earlier, (2) including more Indian battles in the West, and (3) ending much later than the conventional wisdom suggests. Following Longfellow's famous poem, we tend to put the start of the Revolution at April 19, 1775, when Lexington and Concord flared up. We conventionally mark the end of the Revolution at either the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 or the Peace of Paris in 1783. But John Adams claimed the American Revolution began much earlier, in a Boston courtroom in February 1761, when James Otis delivered a speech asserting that Americans had the right to interpret English constitutional principles and rights differently from British politicians back home. In fact, according to Adams, many Patriot Americans had already declared their independence from the mother country in their minds and hearts before a shot was fired.... But to mean anything, ideas on parchment had to be backed by victories on battlefields. Americans simply had to wear down the British will to keep them in the empire.... We tend to overlook the importance of the Indian battles. Successfully confronting Indian unrest among the Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, and Miami was critical to the struggle for independence. Many Indian battles, even as late as Fallen Timbers (1794) and Tippecanoe (1811), were due to British agitation of her Indian allies who continued to harass American settlers in the West.... As for an ending date, Jefferson called the Election of 1800 the Second American Revolution. And the War of 1812 was widely perceived to be the Second War for Independence because it was not until the conclusion of that conflict that the British seemed truly resigned to having lost her 13 North American colonies.

In 1794 the Battle of Fallen Timbers took place outside of present-day Toledo, OH. It should be seen in the context of the War for Independence and American Revolution.

5. The American founders, a minority of the population, were gutsy. Given similar circumstances today, we would probably be either Loyalists or fence-sitters. I'd wager that most of us today would not be treasonous but play it safe. Americans in 1776 were, after all, part of the greatest empire on earth. We enjoyed more rights and liberties than any other people. Why risk it all?... John Adams observed that 1/3 of the population was Patriot, 1/3 was Loyalist, and 1/3 was opportunistic or neutral. We are not as animated by constitutional ideals and historic precedents as much as they were. Maybe some of us would tip our hat to the most conservative founder, John Dickinson. But probably not. The War for Independence was a vicious civil war here at home. Even non-combatants paid dearly. We'd seek convenience and try to avoid the pain.... American Patriots were fighting the superpower of the day, against the greatest army on earth and the greatest navy on the seas. The odds of winning were slim. There was much to lose if you committed high treason against the Crown, not least of which was life and limb. Most people are not willing to risk their all.... The American Revolution almost didn't happen. On several occasions, it was almost aborted. That's why I title my course, "The Amazing American Revolution." It is amazing that the founders pulled it off.

4. In its street plan, Washington, DC, is one of the great Baroque (and broke) cities of the world. Architecturally, it looks like a latter-day outpost of Rome. In plan, L'Enfant, Ellicott, and the McMillan Commission all reinforced the classical and baroque motifs. Even as late as the 1930s, FDR's Washington seemed to be competing to become the Third Rome (as were Hitler's Berlin, Mussolini's Rome, and to some extent even Stalin's Moscow).

L'Enfant's street plan for the new capital city appealed to the Baroque imagination.

3. George III was every bit the revolutionary that George Washington was. The king was a revolutionizing tyrant, destroying the English constitution and denying the ancient rights of Englishmen to colonial subjects. His tyranny was as revolutionary as George Washington's principled resistance was. Perhaps the American founding could best be described with the Burkean phrase, "a revolution not made, but prevented." For the revolutionary impulse was largely kept within bounds when compared to the later French Revolution or Russian Revolution. As the historian John Willson suggests, maybe this is the true achievement of the American founders, to form a more perfect union without turning the world upside down.

2. The founders' understanding of freedom was different from ours. They did not think it was the right to do whatever you wanted. They were not libertarians. The founders' understanding of freedom merged two intellectual streams of thought. One was the civic republican tradition, an inheritance of classical, Renaissance, and English Whig thought; it emphasized the citizens' duties to the commonwealth and engendered the habit of putting service before self. The other was the natural rights tradition, influenced by William of Occam, John Locke, and the Enlightenment; it emphasized the government's duty to the individual, especially to protect one's God-given right to life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness. Taken together, both the republican and liberal streams of thought recognize that freedom comprises rights and duties.... Further, freedom must be ordered to be secured; otherwise it can devolve into licentiousness and/or anarchy, as Polybius, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus taught when meditating on the Roman experience.... Gouverneur Morris's 52-word Preamble to the U.S. Constitution offers a sublime lesson in the five conditions that must obtain before a people can be truly free. Every American should know this wonderful little lesson in political philosophy.

The first page of the U.S. Constitution containing Gouverneur Morris's 52-word Preamble, one of the most sublime lessons in political philosophy ever crafted.

1. The founders spoke of our nation's happiness. They were concerned about posterity -- about our happiness. Of all the state papers ever produced, one of the most famous is the Declaration of Independence. And of all the phrases Jefferson ever penned, surely one of the most appealing to modern sensibilities is "the pursuit of happiness." That line has played a part in shaping the modern world. Yet most Americans today are not familiar with older conceptions of happiness. The founders would not have confused happiness with power, profit, prestige, pleasure, or pride in getting our way. What does the pursuit of happiness entail? To the founders, above all it meant reconciling the public duties of our civic republican tradition with the private rights of our natural law tradition. But the private sense of happiness does not end there. At the end of Sophocles' play, Antigone, the chorus instructs us in the happiness we seek. The main ingredient of happiness is wisdom. How do we become wise? For most of us, punishment and suffering pound out our foolishness. They school us until we learn the lessons needed to live the good life. Experience teaches that wisdom mostly comes from keeping a clear conscience, worshiping God rightly, and learning from mistakes, our own and others'. If we are mindful of these things, we have a shot at being happy. We are smart about "the pursuit of happiness." For we know that, absent wisdom, there is no happiness.

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Final thoughts in the final class

There were several honorable mentions cited by the class, nuggets that almost made it into the Top Ten. For example, they enjoyed learning about the critical moment in American history that occurred in Newburgh, New York, on the Ides of March 1783, when George Washington saved the new republic from impatient, angry officers who wanted him to lead a junta against the Confederated Congress.

One woman in class was fascinated by how rifling a gun barrel was a technological leap over smooth-bore muskets, increasing the lethal velocity of a lead ball. In a related vein, a man seized on Nathaniel Greene's brilliant strategy at Cowpens and Guildford Courthouse.

Of course, they enjoyed all the people stories -- of Nathan Hale's bravery in the face of death, of Molly Pitcher manning the cannon after her husband collapsed, of Abigail Adams watching the early battles with her children, of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys in the Grants, of John Paul Jones's daring-do off the coast of Scotland, etc. There is never enough time for all the interesting people stories, but they are what make history come alive in any class.

Bottom line: Time will tell, future historians will ratify, whether America is the greatest republic ever founded. A little perspective is in order. Our republic has existed less than 240 years. Chinese dynasties passed the baton for some 4,000 years. Egyptian civilization lasted some 3,000 years. The Venetian Republic lasted more than 1,000 years. The Roman republic lasted some 500 years. A fraction of that age, our American nation is a relative new-comer to the world stage. Are we up to the awesome task of continuing it? As Benjamin Franklin told the woman outside the Pennsylvania State House in 1787, the founders bequeathed to the American people a republic. Now it is up to us to keep it.

The United States Capitol is freighted with architectural significance, marrying the eternal heavens with earthly ambition and achievement. Reminiscent of St. Peter's and (further back) the Roman Pantheon, the circular dome symbolizes the eternal first principles of a constitutional republic in which the people are sovereign under the rule of law. The rectangular floor plan that rises from the foundation symbolizes our nation's connection to bedrock, rich soil, and vast natural resources, a geographic grounding reinforced by the structure's orientation along the four cardinal directions.

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For more about the American founding, please see my other essays on this blog along with the many links to additional works.

For more about leadership, please visit the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies http://www.allpresidents.org/.