Live at the National Constitution Center

Revolutionary Prophecies

February 16, 2021

Share

On Presidents Day, National Constitution Center President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen moderated a discussion about the diverse cast of characters that helped to found the nation, including America’s early presidents. Jeff was joined by historians Joanne Freeman of Yale who is also a host of the podcast Backstory, Robert McDonald of West Point, and Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia—all of whom are contributors to the new volume Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founders and America’s Future.

FULL PODCAST

Or, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

PARTICIPANTS

Joanne Freeman is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and of American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of several books, including The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. She is a co-host of the podcast, BackStory, and has worked on documentaries for PBS and the History Channel. Freeman also served as a historical consultant for the National Park Service.

Robert McDonald is Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is the author of Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time, and the editor of several other volumes. McDonald's work has also published articles in the Journal of the Early Republic, The Historian, and Southern Cultures.

Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, and Senior Research Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. His is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Conflicts in the United States and Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. Along with Ed Ayers and Brian Balogh, Onuf was founding co-host of the public radio program “Backstory with the American History Guys."

Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

This episode was produced by Jackie McDermott, John Guerra, and Lana Ulrich. It was engineered by Greg Scheckler. 

Stay Connected and Learn More

Questions or comments about the show? Email us at [email protected].

Continue today’s conversation on Facebook and Twitter using @ConstitutionCtr.

Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate, at bit.ly/constitutionweekly.

Please subscribe to Live at the National Constitution Center and our companion podcast We the People on Apple PodcastsStitcher, or your favorite podcast app.

To watch National Constitution Center Town Halls live, check out our schedule of upcoming programs. Register through Zoom to ask your constitutional questions in the Q&A or watch live on YouTube.

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.

Jackie McDermott: [00:00:00] Welcome to Live at the National Constitution Center. I'm Jackie McDermott, the show's producer. On president's day, we hosted a discussion of the diverse cast of characters that helped to found the nation, including America's early presidents. Jeffrey Rosen was joined by historians, Joanne Freeman, Robert McDonald, and Peter Onuf. They also discuss the new volume, Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founders and America's Future, to which they are all contributors. Here's Jeff to get the conversation started.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:00:31] It is wonderful to be with you all. I'm going to start with a quotation from Jefferson. Peter, and Rob that you have written about Jefferson. Joanne, of course, studied him so deeply and in your introduction to this volume, you quote Jefferson on the future. I have the great pleasure of reading this quotation. Describing the decision to declare independence and how the fight for liberty would shape human history Jefferson said, "May it be to the world what I believe it will be in some parts sooner, to others later, but finally, to all the signal of arousing men, to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them, to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government." That gorgeous quotation. Jefferson was always denouncing monkish superstition. He didn't like rituals or priestly hierarchies, but believed in the universality of divine truth. And he is expressing here an enlightenment faith that the American revolution will open all eyes to the rights of men. And then of course the final quotation, gosh, this is the gift that keeps on giving. He says, "This will prove to all that the massive mankind is not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. Peter, okay. So I took the privilege of reading the quotation. You wrote in your introduction how Jefferson's enlightenment faith represented a particular vision of the future rooted in its time. Describe Jefferson's vision of the future and how widely shared it was among the other founders.

Peter Onuf: [00:02:21] Well, that last bit is the right question to ask, Jeff. How widely shared. There's something about prophecies. Prophecies I like to think of are like prayers. And you use the word faith, too. You believe. You believe that in the fullness of time, this result is going to happen. And what Jefferson is telling us throughout his life with his visionary rhetoric, which is inspiring, he's betraying deep fears. And I think that's important to keep in mind because what we emphasize in this volume is the diversity of perspectives. The anxiety about the future. If you look far enough and you believe deeply enough in this faith, in the Republican project, then you can see beyond what's troubling you now. We tried the mass of the people. Well, I think that's to the core of things for elite people like Thomas Jefferson. What about the masses? What about ordinary people in 1776? Who, among Jefferson's class of enlightened elite, really believe in the people in their capacity to govern themselves? This is why Jefferson's so famous for being the founder of my university, for being a great proponent of education. Because without education, without enlightenment and for Jefferson, it's not just enlightenment of the few, the intellectuals. It's everybody has to be enlightened. I think the place to start, and I'd love to hear what my colleagues have to say about this too, is the great challenge in the middle of a war in 1776, is the challenge of mobilization is getting people to fight, sustaining morale, giving them something to fight for the first time in world history, in the history of the West, at least. It's up to the people. The very idea of the people is a new idea. That the people could be, not just the masses who must be governed, but have the capacity, not just the govern themselves, but to change the world, to make history. This is an ambitious project. And when you think about the odds on Americans winning this war. It gives you some sense of why this is so seems so hyperbolic, so inspiring as you said, Jeff, because if you don't have that faith, if you don't believe in it, it's not going to happen. And I think in a way, it's that whole load of anxiety that we need to remember about all the founders, but particularly Jefferson, because we draw on him for that notion of our arc of history, of national history leading to this enlightened outcome. Well, Jefferson also says this and that is that every generation has to rise to the moment, to its moment. The earth belongs to the living. And as I tell my young friends and colleagues, I'm outta here, it's up to them. And if they don't have that spirit, so it's not that we can return to 1776, but we have to take something from 1776. This is Jefferson's message. And that has to be a dedication to keep fighting the good fight, because that's never going to end.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:05:45] Wonderful. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Rob.  But in the course of amplifying on Peter's great statement, and of course you've written about Jefferson too, I wanted you to tell us about George Washington, because this is president's day and perhaps you've written about Washington and we have a great chapter in the book about Washington's vision for the United States written by Kenneth Bowling. Tell us about how Washington's vision different from Jefferson.

Rob McDonald: [00:06:08] Well, I mean, you know, they were two different men. They had different thoughts and different ambitions, but I think they shared kind of a grand vision for the future of the United States. I mean, this was one of their shared products and shared projects and a product of their shared vision was the nation's capital, Washington D.C., which certainly was not designed according to a modest plan. You know, had this magnificent capital at its center. It had these avenues radiating out toward the States named after the States. And it was in that city, on July 4th, 1826, that the mayor of Washington D.C. Roger Weightman read aloud that letter, which you had quoted from, that he received from Thomas Jefferson. That was essentially Thomas Jefferson's last letter and he wrote it 10 days before he died. He wrote it on June 24th, 1826. Weightman didn't realize this as he read the letter aloud, but Jefferson had died on that day. Jefferson died at noon, the 4th of July about, you know, I think it was exactly 50 years to the hour after the Continental Congress had ratified the Declaration of Independence. So Peter referred to prophecies, his prayers, and, you know, there being sort of an element of faith in all of this. I think, you know, a lot of Americans faith in this project was affirmed by the fact that Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826. And amazingly it wasn't just Thomas Jefferson.  I mean, Jefferson was the pen of independence, but really in the continental Congress the mouth of independence was John Adams. And he died later that afternoon, also on the 4th of July, 1826. And I suppose if Americans, at that point in time were pessimistic people, they could have taken that as a very bad sign, but they didn't. They took it as a sign of God's approbation of this great project. And so I think that letter It always had a meaning beyond just what Jefferson was saying. I mean, the big exclamation mark at the end of it was the fact that these two principle statesmen in favor of independence lived for a very full 50 years after the ratification of the declaration.  And what are the odds? What are the chances? And how could this not be a man that this experiment with the United States was. you know, getting a seal of approval from on high.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:08:31] Joanne, in your afterward the contradictions and paradoxes of American future gazing, you say they're a whole bunch of questions that the founding generation was grappling with and different groups and people had different answers to them. They range from would Americans experiment in self-government function? Could a Republic survive in the modern day? Would the new world rise above old-world corruption? What of the nation's original sin: slavery? And you say that different groups and different founders have different questions to that from the founders and common folks to Native Americans and women and enslaved people themselves. Tell us about how peoples and groups vision of the future was shaped by where they came from during the founding.

Joanne Freeman: [00:09:15] One of the really distinctive things about this time period, the revolution and then the early part of the early Republic, is that it's a time of extreme contingency, right? It's a time, and this very much has to do with the future, it's a time when people really of all kinds really believed that if not anything could happen, there was a pretty wide spectrum of things that could happen. And what happens during those times is on the one hand, it's easy to panic and to go to a dark place and do things that you might not otherwise do, but it's also possible to think bigger and to think change and to think reform. Both of those things are possible in some ways we're kind of in an interesting contingency moment now. In this time period, what that means in part is the very things that Peter was talking about, the rhetoric and the spirit and the mobilizing people with you know, ideas on emotion and faith and heart and all of the things you need to get people to fight, that message spread widely. And that message did not just spread into the future of elite white men who had some political power. So part of what I write about in the book and part of what you can say more generally is the message and the meaning of the revolution it was wider than necessarily some wanted it to be. And there are people who get a sense of a different future because of that rhetoric, because of that fight, because of what it meant. Who see that, you know, perhaps they could be living a different kind of life in the future, whether that's the average person, whether that's an enslaved person, whether that's a woman. Women become very politicized. They're fighting the revolution. Right. They have a sense after the war that maybe things have changed, you know, maybe I'm going to have a different kind of a status. There's a period, after like in the, I'd say the 1790s and a little bit after that, when you can feel all of these non-white elite populations at least open to something different. And then basically the world or elite white men come down on their heads basically and reign them in. So that whatever was brewing doesn't necessarily continue. But I still think regardless of that sort of backlash moment, the fact of the matter is, and this is part of what Jefferson's talking about and what Rob and Peter both referred to, that message, which had to be strong for the time and is very future minded, it's still a powerful message. The problem is that we're in a different present when we talk about that future and that always complicates what that future is and what we might want it to be. Your future is a product of where you are which is part of the problem with going back to the founders and directly translating what they say to the present. They were starting, they were standing in a very different place. So of course they were projecting a different future. In our times, you know, with the same stimuli, we are going to come up with a very different idea of where American democracy might go.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:12:24] That's such an important reminder and comes across so powerfully that people's vision of the future is powerfully shaped by their understanding of the present, the particular struggles they're dealing with, and all of our foresight is accordingly limited. Peter, you have a wonderful chapter about Isaiah Thomas who was a printer and acolyte of Thomas Jefferson. He founded the American antiquarian society, which turns out to have been more focused on collecting what seems like folk history to chronicle American democracy than simply looking backward. And he also had a particular ideology of a virtue and how ordinary people had to master it that shaped his understanding of democracy. Tell us why you chose to highlight Isaiah Thomas and what he can teach us about the founder's vision of the future.

Peter Onuf: [00:13:11] Well, Jeff, there's a simple answer to why I chose Isaiah Thomas. I was spending a year at the American Antiquarian Society. Because I finished with Thomas Jefferson. Rob, you can have him. Thomas is a fascinating character and he raises questions that I think are really centrally important. If you want to imagine a free people and sustaining their freedom, what's required? I think what Thomas and his fellow antiquarians their answer to this question was, well, they need to understand where they came from. They need a history, an instant history. Not the kind of history that you worship ancestors. Not that kind of history that legitimates monarchal rule or aristocracy. Not dynastic history. It has to be a history of the people. But there was no people until it imagined itself to be one. In the act of imagining themselves, then keeping an ongoing record of everything they've done. You said folk history, the history of the whole people, to give people a language, a common set of things to orient to, and this leads to the central importance, and I think it's an interesting resonance with today, print would be the way that people could come together. It would mediate. We talk about social media. Imagine the print public sphere, as historians call it, that imaginary invented world, but it's real same time in which the texts circulate all over the country. When we read from the same Declaration of Independence and Thomas himself, this printer in Massachusetts, reads the Declaration of Independence out loud to his townsmen in Worcester, Massachusetts, this is a moment that's replicated all over the country creating that sense of simultaneity of being together in this project. We see social media as divisive for a believer in the enlightenment. Like I say, Thomas or Thomas Jefferson, they both have shared this faith that once the news is out and the people can see clearly and they are no longer under the thumb of the aristocrats, they believe in themselves. And this is an amazingly, but in world historical terms, literate people. They can read. They can write. They can create the evidence of their own imprint on the times. Imprint is a good word because it's through print that people began to see themselves as if the media is a mirror within which, from which Americans can gain a sense of themselves collectively. This is almost miraculous for Thomas, as he thinks about it, that this moment artisans like himself, a mere printer, with an ink stained wretch, how do these people claim to be important? What they do? They do everything. They make it possible for ordinary people to rise up, to become enlightened. Because democracy and a Republic is predicated on this fundamental premise: all citizens are created equal. And if you're going to really have a Republican people, then that equality principle has to be made real. There has to be participation and that's enabled by the print media. This is the fundamental difference, I'd like to throw out for you all, between then and now. The revolution is a time of coming together in a novel, exciting way that never had happened before when the people make their own history that makes their own government, they governed themselves. And it's through the media that that becomes possible. Vast distances in the 18th century, from Northern most New Hampshire to Georgia. How do people at such great distances in such different ways of life from the slave holding South to the North, how are these people come together? And this enormous act of elective mobilization through print. We're now living in the wake of the imagining the past as a golden age, when Patriots stood together and they invented something new, we honor the fathers. We don't realize how badly divided they were and what sustained them was that willful, intentional coming together. We're afraid we're going to lose it. And that's been the way we think about history is something, a precious legacy that we're just not quite good enough. And we prove it to ourselves. Every November we screw it up once more. I think what's really important is to understand, and Joanne used the word contingency, how fragile and tenuous this whole project of union. That word is so important in this period. Coming together, associating, how can you sustain a union? So it's, I think it's really important when we think about history as Isaiah Thomas thought about his history, it has to be a living history, like a living constitution. A history that we continuously make. We keep that record and we then draw on that. Future generations will look back not just to the big "F" Founders. They'll look at everybody, small as we all are founders.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:19:07] Fascinating. And you've put on the table a really important question that I want to dig into which is how did we, if we did, we the people lose that enlightenment sense of optimism, particularly about the media as you describe it for Isaiah Thomas? The media was a medium of popular participation that could unite artisans and citizens. James Madison imagined an enlightened group of journalists. He called the literati who would use the print media to spread thoughtful deliberation across the vast expanse of the new Republic. Today, of course we fear that social media is spreading disinformation and polarization, rather than light and is leading to the very factions that the founders denounced. So, Peter, it's a very big question, but jumping off of Jefferson, cause you've written so much about him and there are a whole bunch of questions about Jefferson in the chatbox, including please discuss the founders and Jefferson's understanding of virtue and whether or not their understanding is understood today. How has the understanding of Jefferson changed since the publication of Dumont Malone's biography? And Jefferson decried monkish superstition to his vision include a sense of the many unjust and corrupted civic commercial and political systems he named as personifying the social center. I think the question I want to ask you is a version of, "What would Jefferson have made of Facebook?" but it's in particular, you know, given Jefferson's belief, his faith, his confidence, his optimism, that with enough access to education, citizens couldn't muster the virtue, the  virtuous self-discipline to govern their unruly passions and be ruled by reason. What would he have made of our vexations today?

Rob McDonald: [00:20:47] Peter would have done a much better job answering that question. I thought you were directing it toward him. So I'm going to think on my feet here, but we should remember there really was never a golden age, as far as the American press was concerned. And as polarized as our media may be now it doesn't get much more polarized than the newspaper wars of the 1790s and early 19th century. And I think in part it was because at least today, you know, we have a tradition of a two-party system and I'd like to think maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like to think that you know, most Americans believe that members of the opposite party are well-intentioned and they respect fundamentally their patriotism. They may disagree about what path to pursue and the means by which we want to achieve particular ends, but we sort of acknowledge the legitimacy of each other. They didn't in the 1790s. I mean, the Federalists, the Republicans, neither party really considered itself a party. Each party, I think believed that it was speaking for America and speaking for the true American revolutionaries and the opposite party, they were a party, they were a faction. And, and they were somehow profoundly illegitimate and potentially un-American. The Federalists, you know, Hamilton and Adams smeared the Republicans of Jefferson and Madison is not really being American revolutionaries, but really being French revolutionaries. And, you know, the newspapers that support the Jefferson and Madison on the Republican side accused the Federalists of not being American revolutionaries, but of being monarchists and counter revolutionaries. So, you know, there certainly was a lot of distrust baked into the debate of the early Republic. We see efforts during the quasi war with France to clamp down on press freedoms through the 1798 Sedition Act and that probably backfired. It's probably one of the things that led to Jefferson's election in 1800 and the rise of the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Virginia dynasty that follows. So, you know, I think one of the things that we can take heart in is the fact that when we consult our path, we not only see great examples of statesmanship and virtue and selflessness, but we also see that even this generation, this great generation that established the United States had its own very deep internal divisions and they fumbled through it. Maybe that can give us hope that we can too.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:23:29] Joanne you're the world expert on civil war era violence and on the polarization that led to the civil war. Sort of tell us how we got from the factious fights that Rob just described around the election of 1800 to the civil war. And what, what forces ideological, political, technological sort of rip the country apart?

Joanne Freeman: [00:23:54] Pardon me. I spent part of the afternoon rehearsing with a grad student for her oral exams and what caused the civil war brought me right back. Wow. That's a question. But, but I did actually. So this is right where I wanted to go. I wanted to address the technological component of your question and talk about the fact that newspapers were central to bringing people together and bringing the nation together and bringing different areas together and became central to giving people a voice. There's someone I think in 1801 that talks about the fact that without our newspaper, I'm just one voice. So they really had a power to them. But what's interesting about technology, if you take a step back for a moment and think about democracy broadly, democracy eat its bare bones is a conversation between the American public and the people who they give power to. Technology shapes the conversation. So when technologies come along that change how people connect to each other and change what they see of how government is functioning, democracies change. So, you know, one of the things that happens let's say, in the two decades before the civil war, you get the telegraph. Now, the Telegraph you would think, and very much based on what Rob and Peter was saying, you would think that it's, the more we can get people enlightened about what other Americans are saying, the better it will be. But that's not necessarily the case and in the 1840s and 1850s it wasn't because what people saw was extreme language on the other side. So technology, the telegraph, moved information with such speed and so widely, so much more widely than it ever had before, that Americans got to know each other at a moment when they were being really torn apart by the question of slavery. So technology didn't cause the civil war, but it helped shape the debates and the fighting and the partisanship and the inability for people to talk to each other. Actually, ironically, the breakdown of language. There's a debate in Congress at one point where they're very worried just about what one side might say to the other side and obviously newspapers and the Telegraph are part of this. And one member of Congress stands up and says, we just have to watch our words. Just no bad words. If we say only the right words, this will be better. If that's the state of affairs that you're in, then technologies are really going to complicate that picture maybe in good ways, maybe in not so good ways. And by spreading information so quickly in the 1850s, they helped spawn conspiracy theories because people had so much information so quickly and didn't necessarily have it interpreted. It was very easy to spin conspiracy series. You can see why as someone who's studying the first half of the 19th century, I exist in the present and sometimes think that's a similarity. That's another similarity.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:26:58] That's a deep and fascinating point. What you just said, if the battle for democracy remains the same, but the media technology can shape the nature of the debate. And you just gave the example of the telegraph, which far from making things more united ended up introducing Americans to each other at a time when they were divided, accelerating the polarization. Fascinating. So Peter, that leads me to ask, you give an account of Isaiah Thomas' defense of free speech which is rooted in the technology of his time. Samuel Miller, who's writing to Thomas' readers, says that when the press becomes free, the principles of government, the spirit and tendency of public measures, the public and private characters of individuals are all tried and decided in the court of public opinion, putting rulers and the ruled on the same level. And Thomas and Miller contrast this to the partisan press which they say will ferment division unlike these virtuous small printers who will kind of allow reason to spread. So say more about the relationship between the printing press technology and Thomas' theory of free speech. I'll just add, this may sound a little wonky, but I was rereading Milton's Areopagitica, and of course he's emphasizing the whole thing is an attack on the licensing system of his time and saying that it is an offense against the free exercise of reason to have to submit your thoughts or conscience to a licenser or a censor in advance because reason can't be alienated to someone else. It is inherent. So run with this important theme. What did Thomas think was the relationship between the printing press and the defense of free speech and how relevant is his defense of free speech now that the media technologies have completely changed?

Peter Onuf: [00:28:43] Well, Thomas believed he had to believe as a printer and somebody who had contributed himself so much to the revolutionary ferment, that this was the way forward. But it's important to note that when he, long before he created the American Antiquarian Society or wrote his history of American printing, he quit the business himself. He'd become first publisher and then he retired to become a grant man in the Franklin mode. And one of his ambitions throughout his life was to create a school for apprentice printers. Bring on the next generation as if we needed more newspapers. But even as he's telling us, this is the vision of the Antiquarian Society, the free circulation of innovation, the collection of all its history. If it's in the context of big division and disappointment it's best, as Rob was pointing out about the 1790s, drove a lot of people crazy. And Joanne's exactly right of media bring us together, they take us apart, and you might even say when they bring us together, as they did in the revolution against not only foreign against internal enemy, against stories and loyalists, conflict has been the theme throughout. And the spirit of 1776 is a nice phrase because it's suggests let's go back to the time when we were fighting the good fight, a war. Elections thereafter would be wars. Well, up to a point, yes, you need to mobilize. That's the key word. That enables you, and this is very important, the party system succeeded to the extent that they were national parties, that is until they ceased to be national parties. As national parties, they did bind the union together in a kind of predictable, regular recurrence of an electoral warfare against their partisan foes. It's keeping it within the bounds. Energizing a political public. We're not energizing them too much. It's telling them the truth, but it has to be slanted toward your truth. And there are deep divisions about the future. Many of the founders simply wanted to recreate on American lines to the British empire. They had visions of grandeur that many ordinary farmers were suspicious. People who were not didn't see themselves as masters of this new universe, but who wanted to preserve their way of life. Because this was in 1776, the best poor man's country in the world. Why would you want to change it? Well, those people who looked at westward expansion, they'd say, I'll tell you why you want to expand it, because here's an opportunity for you. We can take this warfare sublimated into economic expansion and development, then this will be a great and powerful nation. Well then there's the temptations of national power and grandeur. Where would that be? This is an environment which people are born to suspect each other's good faith. And that's crucial. I said before, faith is so important to this vision, this Jeffersonian, this American, this founder's vision. Well, if faith isn't important, are your fellow countrymen, do they worship the right god? Do they have your faith? I think good Americans, have you ever heard this phrase un-American?  Well, it dates back to this period, and Rob was suggesting before, the heritage. That you're really an Anglo file, an Anglo man. And you want to, you want to recreate the actual British empire or you're a French nut, and you want to create this out of control, anarchic, pseudo democracy. These are all plausible ideas, because the reality, the thing that could happen at any moment, is it could all fall apart. Anarchy. That fear you could say the history of all these prophecies in early period is the outcome is the American civil war. That is imminent in the very idea of an empire for liberty is the notion of total war.  This is not a hopeful message. What it means though I just put a hopeful spin on it, is that recognizing our capacity to destroy this fragile thing, our federal Republic, understanding how much it is every generation's responsibility to keep the thing going. This is why partisanship was really important. It made the whole machinery work. But something else was important. And that was compromise. Because after all the constitution, as you know, was a bundle of compromises. That's pejorative language now. It wasn't then. Because what that meant is principled statesmen were willing to put aside their particular interests of their state or region, and imagine the need for sustaining a union, an expanding union. That wasn't inspiring faith, but it required that you would transcend, overcome your particular interests. And that's not easy because you suspect that the other guy, they're up to no good. And by the time, Joanne's talking about the coming of the civil war slavery. How do you reconcile these things? Compromise becomes pejorative in the context of sustaining a union with a slave power.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:34:37] Thank you for all that. You said many important and illuminating things, including that things were extraordinarily divisive at the time of the framing, that the nation was at the precipice of disunion and eventually actually fell over that precipice. And the one thing that held it together it was a shared commitment to compromise and deliberation and the constitution itself. And all of you stress in your introductions and in the essays in the book, that the constitution was the common language and the language of constitutional debate was the unifying language that did indeed knit Americans together. Rob, just continuing this crucial theme. Many of our friends in the Q and A box were asking a version of the same question... how would you compare divisiveness and today's media versus those of the early years? Thinking of James Calendar, Mark Altman. The media focus of the founders was on accurate information, less on journals, such as the national interests which Jefferson used to attack Adams. Current social media is not focused on accuracy, more on the narrative. I guess, in giving some texture to the comparison that Peter just made so well, we know we understand things were divisive and they eventually collapsed and now they're divisive and we hope they won't collapse, but did different founders have different visions and optimism about whether things would collapse and about the future based on their own perspective? And perhaps compare John Adams, who your author calls a sort of provincial imperialist with George Washington, whose birthday it is today. Compare Adams and Washington's vision of the future and how optimistic were they about the possibility of maintaining the union?

Rob McDonald: [00:36:15] Well, you've given me a lot to chew on Jeff. I think it's like all of us at various times. They were optimistic and at other times they were pessimistic. They live long lives. They experienced, you know, many different things and sometimes the same thing would sound very different under different circumstances. My mind keeps going back to Jefferson's letter to Roger Weightman, which you quoted from at the beginning of this program. I think I first read it when I was an undergraduate at the university of Virginia and Peter Onuf was my professor and it was 1990 or 1991. That letter, it seems so true because it seems to be coming true throughout the world. I mean, I walked to class and you might remember the days when there were printed newspapers and they were on display and on sale in these boxes and you could put 50 cents and then you get a Washington Post or what have you. Every day on the cover of the Washington Post, some Soviet Republic was declaring its independence. And it really seemed that all eyes were opening to the rights of man. Yet now, decades later, we're in a different place internationally. That nice, easy narrative of freedom's march seems more complicated than it did. I think that they, like us, responded in different ways at different times and had different levels of optimism.  I think that John Adams, his greatest project was independence and he perceived the American union correctly to be essential to that independence. Among his last words were independent now, independent forever.  I think the union, he's always very instrumental to the maintenance of American independence and Washington shared that. I think that's really one of the things that ties all of these founders together. You know, they might've disagreed about what that union should look like. They might've disagreed about how that union should move forward. About how much union we should have. And you can understand that essential disagreement. We wanted a government that would be strong enough to protect our liberty, but not so strong that it would pose a threat to the liberty that it was designed to protect.  If we had a government that was too decentralized, we really didn't have much union at all. But if we had a government that was overly centralized, it was making decisions and, and sort of collectivizing decision-making in ways that it didn't need to, then union would be maybe brittle and endangered as a result of it. So again, I keep going back to the main point which is that whenever I watch the news, it's unsettling and frequently and increasingly it seems that that's the case. I do sort of take some pleasure in thinking about the fact that this previous generation of Americans who, as Joanne said, lived in a period of incredible contingency and an unpredictability, they were able to sustain themselves and improve themselves both together as citizens of the United States or as individuals. I think about Isaiah Thomas. Peter wrote about so thoughtfully and revolutionary processes. He is in many ways and I think many of the people listening probably add this thought, he sounds a lot like Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin is written about by the late Robert Ferguson who took a look at Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and in a way it's almost like a self-help book. If Ben Franklin can do it, you can do it too. And so, I think we can maybe get a pep talk from the founding generation as well.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:40:09] Well, that's wonderful and it's impossible to get a better pep-talk than Franklin and his account of the 13 virtues that he took from Pythagoras to inspire himself and then he said he could master temperance and justice and humility. I tried his system once a couple of years ago. You were supposed to put an X every time you fall short of a virtue. It's incredibly depressing, of course, but it's also a very inspiring reminder of the power that all of us have by achieving personal self-government to contribute to political self-government.  I need to note our friend Warren Wolf reminds me that Washington's actual birthday is February 22nd. He was, I see from a quick Google, born in Virginia on February 11th, according to the venues Julian calendar, but in 1752, we moved to the Gregorian calendar. So his actual birthday is February 22nd. Thank you for that. Joanne, here's the question I want to ask you. Rob just said the framers shared a belief in American exceptionalism. And my basic question is: have we lost that faith and why? And in the course of answering that big question, you know, maybe tell us a little bit about the differences among the founding fathers. I'd wanted you to talk about Hamilton, who the book says uses Jeffersonian means of democracy to achieve his Hamiltonians of centralization. Is it a fair generalization to say, despite the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson and so forth, they shared a belief in American exceptionalism, which perhaps not everyone shares today?

Joanne Freeman: [00:41:43] Wow. Okay. That's another big question. I'll start with Hamilton and work my way to something bigger. What's interesting about Hamilton unlike some of the other founders and of course, what Rob, Peter and I are all saying in one way or another, without putting it this bluntly, there is no founder blob, right? There's not one founder and the founders don't believe anything. So Hamilton, you know, he has his own feelings about things. He was pretty, he would've said realistic. We might say pessimistic about human nature. Right. He just thought people generally are going to do what, whatever they can do to help themselves and you put governments in effect to channel selfish interests and that's what government is for. So in that sense, he would not have said that the American experiment was exceptional, except the things that I think I just said, there's no founder blob, and I'm going to kind of bring them together into a blob. I think in different ways, a lot of that, a lot of the people, the framers in that period would have fought about, I guess, lost where I was going in moving it.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:42:54] The Founder blog - what's the big idea that they shared?

Joanne Freeman: [00:42:59] The idea that they shared. I just said that Hamilton was pessimistic. Oh, I know I'm back. What they all would have shared was a fundamental belief in process. Right. So because the constitution represented a spirit of government, represented a structure of a government, the framework of a government, a lot of things. But what it represented more than anything else was a process, a process that could put things into action and a process to go back to when things spun out of control. There's a Jefferson, a letter, an exchange of letters after the election of 1800, which is so fraught, almost falls apart. And someone says to Jefferson, what would you have done if things had spun out of control and like the Federalists had done something to take the election, like what would, what would have happened? And essentially, and this will be a bad Jefferson paraphrase, he says, well, essentially, we would have had some kind of convention. We could like, you know, fix up the constitution and then just keep going. It's the process that I think they all believed was one of the most precious gifts that they were giving to us. They didn't assume that the constitution would be created in marble and then it would stay that way forever. There's a reason why you can amend the constitution, but the fact that it represented a structured process of government that was explicitly supposed to be useful in times of difficulty or crisis, that was something I think that they would all share. Now, if you're talking about Hamilton and being optimistic or pessimistic about the future, poor Hamilton. So Hamilton right now is everyone loves Hamilton. And the real Hamilton is a lot more complicated. And this might be one of those ways. There's an amazing Hamilton document that he writes maybe 10 days after the federal convention. And he's one of the first people who comes forward and says, we need a new convention to create a stronger national government. He's pounding away. You finally get the constitutional convention. There's a new constitution. Hamilton goes home and he writes a very lawyerly document. Like 10 days after the convention. What do I think is going to happen next? And he talks about, you know, well, if Washington becomes president, that's good because people will trust what he does and the people he puts in office. And then if people trust who's in office, they'll probably trust the government. But if that doesn't happen, if either Washington doesn't become president or people don't trust the government, then I think the union might dissolve and there might be separate little confederacies and he describes this sort of chaotic situation. And the kicker of the memo is in the conclusion where having just written about chaos, he says, that's probably what's going to happen. So although he believed in what the American experiment was, he wasn't sure the American government was strong enough to do what people thought they wanted it to do. When he thought about the future, you know, people, you know, at some point he's been called the man who made modern America. I think his vision of the future for America looked a lot like England, which was a powerful empire. I think he understood the things that were distinctive about the United States and felt that he was following them. But I think his vision of what the nation was and what the nation could be, he was invested in it. So I don't want to suggest. Oh, well, it's, nothing's going to happen. So why do I care? He was in it, but he was in it in a way that he felt was going to push it as far as he could push it so that it would hold together beyond all of the things that he thought could chip it apart. And faith in the government and faith in the union were two of the things that he thought were foremost of as importance. And when he shortly, when he died and he dies, of course, suddenly in a duel.  Among the papers he's arranging, he makes one last letter. It's either his last letter or her second to last letter. He writes to a friend and he says something along the lines of whatever you do protect the union. I don't know what's happening. I don't know what the Republicans are doing. Maybe there's going to be a succession in the air. I don't know, protect the union. So in a sense, although all of these founders are spinning off in different directions on so many things were coming into focus on so many things that they actually did share.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:47:21] That is so interesting that was so worth waiting for. And I'm so glad that you called your founder's blob because that insight that they shared, I wrote it down. It was so good. They shared a fundamental belief in process. Process could put things into action and they could go back to that when things spun out of control. That commitment to the processes of the constitution, of constitutional deliberation, of compromise, of the structures of government themselves was what bound them together. That was the central idea. But then you noted that at least Hamilton, wasn't sure that if people lost their trust in the government and their faith in the union whether or not the whole thing would collapse. So Peter in this round, which I think is going to be our last of this fascinating discussion, I want to ask you for closing thoughts, but I'm going to tee up the question. Did other founders have other uncertainties about whether or not the whole thing would work? They share this common commitment to the process. They hope the constitution will hold us together, but what were their fears? And Terry Sontag notes that in his farewell speech, Washington said, "Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." That's after he said that virtue is necessary for happiness using the classical trope and that unless citizens have virtue, there will be no self-government and virtue's impossible without religion and morality. So that was what Washington thought was necessary. Were there other indispensable preconditions for the experiments succeeding that different founders had them and what would they think of today?

Peter Onuf: [00:48:57] Well, I think all of the founders, whatever their pessimism about human nature, Hamilton certainly is pessimistic, do have a basic faith in the civic capacity of Anglo-Americans. And I think the best way to think about why the founders, why the revolutionaries, took the jump in the first place was they had this faith in their own civic capacity and it's the rule of law. Joanne says process. Absolutely right. The processes that surround property and enable property owners to be secure in their property. The capacity that Anglo-Americans had as provincials who create local governments to create state governments. I think the big debate that they called on, or the history that they called on, all people at all times frame their future in terms of their past and the past for Anglo-Americans for independent Americans was the past of the empire. The empire was demonized in the revolution. The British empire was. Americans thought they were exceptional because they were not an imperial people. That was the idea. But what Americans really wanted in different ways was an empire that worked for them the way they thought it had worked for them. A decentralized empire, an empire without a great metropolis, without London. Rob was talking about the problems with centralization. Go way back and it's fundamental to the American story and it's really a British story and it has to do with, can there be an ongoing union of distinct political entities in this transatlantic empire, which is the greatest empire in the history of the world, has federated enormous prosperity and power? Can we hold it together? On what conditions? Rob had it exactly right. That you can't push it too far. You can't over centralize. That's what, all of the revolutionaries from Hamilton to Jefferson to Melton, all of them believed that there had to be a distribution of power along federal lines. Hamilton was somewhat skeptical of that. He would tilt toward a stronger central government, but they all understood. This was the reality on the ground. These are people who have extraordinary. I said, they're literate before. They believe in rule of law. They certainly believe in property for better and for worse. That's the foundation that they're building on and failing to build a lasting superstructure. But it's what they have to work with and it's that civic capacity. And that's what was so marvelous for them about the revolution was the willingness of people to fight for it. The civic capacity cuts both ways. Of course, I think that's the big point. When you have a politicized people, you're going to have conflict and argument. That's the whole point of politics. How do you contain it? So pessimism, I think it's built into the packet. Exceptionalism, well, yes or no. No in the sense that if they are succeeding in their project, it's because they sustain the way of life, property relations, civic life of the old Imperial regime. How do we deal with our past now and imagining our future drawing some inspiration from the founders, from the revolutionaries? Well I think it's in a clear-eyed view of our history as they look at their history, there are no answers there, but there are the questions that we have to strive to answer.

Jeffrey Rosen: [00:52:46] Very well put. No questions. We have to strive for the answers. And I heard you give a sense of contingency of pessimism. If we sustain our commitment to the rule of law and property rights. If we maintain our commitment to process. Then, we can succeed, but success is not guaranteed and that that's an important contingency. Our final contingency, I regret to share, is that cause NCC events must end on time. And we just have one minute. I think that my commitment to that rule is going to have to trump my strong desire to hear final thoughts from Rob and Joanne. So with sincere thanks to the three of you for having increased awareness and understanding of the constitution, having wet our appetite to read your great collection and to study American history and learn from the past so that we can be inspired and cautious about the vexations of the present. I must thank all three of you so much and, and hope that you'll come back to join us for another discussion too. Thanks also to you friends, almost a thousand of you taking time out from your evenings. From seven to eight at night to learn about the constitution. Thank you for fulfilling your civic duty. The founders would have been inspired and all of us the NCC are as well. Peter Onuf, Robert McDonald, Joanne Freeman for a wonderful discussion. Thank you so much. I hope to see you soon.

Jackie McDermott: [00:54:16] This episode was produced by me, Jackie McDermott, along with Lana Ulrich and John Guerra. It was engineered by Greg Scheckler. Please rate, review, and subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts or follow us on Spotify and join us back here next week. On behalf of the National Constitution Center, I'm Jackie McDermott.

Loading...

Explore Further

Podcast
Can the Government Pressure Private Companies to Stifle Speech?

The Supreme Court examines the limits of jawboning

Town Hall Video
Lincoln’s Lessons: Then and Now

Acclaimed Lincoln historians Sidney Blumenthal and Harold Holzer assess Lincoln’s life and legacy to unveil remarkable…

Blog Post
A national TikTok ban and the First Amendment

The recent House passage of a bill banning TikTok from app stores in the United States has ignited a national constitutional…

Educational Video
AP Court Case Review Featuring Caroline Fredrickson (All Levels)

In this fast-paced and fun session, Caroline Fredrickson, one of the legal scholars behind the National Constitution Center’s…

More from the National Constitution Center
Constitution 101

Explore our new 15-unit core curriculum with educational videos, primary texts, and more.

Media Library

Search and browse videos, podcasts, and blog posts on constitutional topics.

Founders’ Library

Discover primary texts and historical documents that span American history and have shaped the American constitutional tradition.

News & Debate