In this episode, Joyce Lee Malcolm, author of The Times That Try Men’s Souls: The Adams, the Quincys, and the Families Divided by the American Revolution—and How They Shaped a New Nation, and Eli Merritt, author of Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution, explore the origins and clashing ideologies during the American Revolution, how loyalists and patriots feared civil war, and how the founders’ fears of demaguges influenced their approach to constitutional design and politics. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates. This program was streamed live on December 13, 2023.
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This episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Bill Pollock, and Tanaya Tauber. It was engineered by Greg Scheckler and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Yara Daraiseh and Cooper Smith.
Participants
Joyce Lee Malcom is professor emerita of law at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. She is the author of several books, including The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold: An American Life; Peter's War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution; and most recently, The Times That Try Men’s Souls: The Adams, the Quincys, and the Families Divided by the American Revolution—and How They Shaped a New Nation.
Eli Merritt is a political historian at Vanderbilt University where he researches the ethics of democracy, the interface of demagogues and democracy, and the founding principles of the United States. He is the editor of How to Save Democracy: Inspiration and Advice From 95 World Leaders as well as of The Curse of Demagogues: Lessons Learned from the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. His new book is Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution and he writes the Substack newsletter American Commonwealth.
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 a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources:
- Eli Merritt, Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution
- Joyce Lee Malcolm, The Times That Try Men's Souls: The Adams, the Quincys, and the Battle for Loyalty in the American Revolution
- The Declaration of Independence
- Eli Merrit, "Why demagogues were the Founding Fathers' greatest fear," LA Times
Excerpt from Interview: Eli Merritt on Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians mutual fear of demagogues, however their fears stemmed from different places.
Eli Merritt: Well as you bring that up, and we can revisit sort of earlier parts of your question, if you would like, as you, as you bring us forward in time, I will share that in the past 24 to 48 hours McCarthyism has very much been on my mind, and I would say, and he is of course, until Donald Trump, I say that in a very nonpartisan way, there is simply no question in my mind that Donald Trump will be studied by democracies, probably for the next 500 years as a supreme demagogue. He just embodies all the greatest talents and destructive talents of the demagogue.
But in any event, until Trump, the most famous demagogue was McCarthy. And as we all know, during the period of the Red Scare, which he was a part of, he demagogued greatly. And so the reason I've been thinking about over the past 24, 48 hours, I don't mean to compare the degree, but what's happened, of course, the committee that McCarthy used to perpetuate his lies and impugn and ruin tens of thousands of lives was the House Committee on un-American activities. And we have recently seen something that feels like a scare going on with the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn, where we're living in a culture now of great sense of fear and danger leading in, in part to the polarization that's causing the weaponization of everything.
So I think that McCarthy's particularly important right now, and a very good book came out three or four years ago, simply called Demagogue about McCarthy. I would also barring from something that Joyce was speaking of, one of the things that fascinates me the most about alluding out to the title of this conversation, which is Loyalists versus Patriots, is that's obviously very stark and binary and black and white Loyalists versus Patriots. And what fascinates me so much is the real truth that if you go back to 1774, 1775, which you see in the development of Patriots and Loyalists, is a transformation or a process of conversion that took place.
And from my book, one of the stories that I find the most fascinating, and it helps to elucidate this in fact, has to do with how and why and when the 13 colonies were able to come together behind the Declaration of Independence or initially a resolution for independence. So just in brief there, the middle colonies in South Carolina in 1776, including June and July of 1776, were very loyal. In fact, all the founders were both loyal to the empire, loyal to their colonies, and there was this slowly growing sense of patriotism or loyalty to, it's even wrong to call it a national entity, but a continental entity that would preserve American rights later became the Continental Congress.
What happened there is most of the delegates of the middle colonies and South Carolina in June and July were flatly opposed to a resolution of independence. And so what happened, Richard Henry Lee, some people might recall, stood up before the Continental Congress on June 7th 1776, and said, "Now the time has finally come when we must unite behind a Declaration of Independence. Otherwise, we will be subdued, we'll be subdued and defeated by the British." And the first day of debates was June 8th. Thomas Jefferson took notes in which he wrote that many middle colony delegates and South Carolinian delegates stood up and basically drew a bright red line in the floors of the Congress. And the word he used was secede. They said, "If this resolution is proceeded now, we will secede from the union." Or there's a risk of that we'll secede.
Now, what's critical to understand is not politics as usual, New England and Virginia were ready at that moment. They were ready to pursue independence, and they were going to pursue independence with or without those middle colonies in South Carolina. They would say, "We're going forward, we can't stop. It's that important. You can join later perhaps." But what happened to this loyalism, which was taken, which was most strong in the middle colonies of South Carolina, what happened to it? There was a deep spirit of join or die on July 1st, 1776 on this vote. You can see how divided it was.
And so what did they do? Did the middle college in South Carolina say, "All right, we're staying with the empire. You guys, go ahead." Think of the map where the middle colonies are between New England and the Southern colonies and Virginia. Those middle colonies were going to become the worst fields of bloodshed in the entire war because the Army, Armies of Virginia and of New England needed to communicate. They would, they would need to have lodging in the middle colonies, they would need to forge, et cetera. So the resolution is quite interesting. What happens here.
I mean, what I would've done is what they did, they decided, we'll vote again tomorrow. They decided, let's just make this be a straw vote. We'll vote again tomorrow. And if I could have one wish as a historian to be back in history as a fly on the wall, I would have overheard probably into the wee hours of the night the negotiations that were going on so they could figure out how to preserve themselves in safety from not just imperial Civil War with Britain, but from Civil War among themselves. Lo and behold, the next day they revote and they essentially have a unanimous vote in favor of independence on July 2nd. It doesn't mean all the delegates voted that way, but a majority and all of the separate delegations voted in favor. New York came around later…
Excerpt from Interview: Joyce Lee M. on the fears of demagogues and disunion.
Jeffrey Rosen: Does the fear of demagogues combine with the fear of disunion? And help us understand how that fear of demagogues coexisted with a varying degrees of toleration for armed protest, including armed insurrection manifested by protest against British central rule, such as the Sons of Liberty?
Joyce Lee M.:It really was a Civil War of the American Revolution, and that's one of the things that got me particularly interested in this division within the American families of some who sided with the government and some who were ready to protest, even to the point of taking up arms. But when it comes to demagogues, I think there wasn't any particular individual who was a demagogue. There are two things I'd like to say. First of all, as the policies became harsher and harsher toward the Americans and they divided one of the things that they most feared was an army even during the war, was that they began to plan a war.
They were extremely afraid of their own forces because they had this long tradition of being afraid of standing armies, professional armies, and that an army or the leader of an army might take control. And they kept a very close tight reign on Washington because they were really afraid that Washington would become such an idol that he would have that power. And in fact, it was after the war that George III said it, if he resigns his commission, he was the, he, he must be the greatest man in the world because they were worried about their own history. Oliver Cromwell taking over after the English Civil War. And of course, Napoleon would take over after the French Revolution.
So we were extremely lucky in Washington. On another subject, there was, with this increasing intolerance and intimidation among themselves, the Sons of Liberty, who are often extolled and rightly for taking a good important stand for individual rights also were the first to really use mob violence. And at the time of the stamp in 1765 in planning how they were gonna combat the Stamp Act and get the British to withdraw it Sam Adams and some of the Sons of Liberty in Boston actually got together with a man who was the leader of a gang in South Boston to bring together a mob. And he brought 3000 people to go through the streets of Boston.
They ended up tearing apart the customs house. They tore apart the building that they thought that the person in charge of stamps for this, for the colony was gonna be located. And then they moved on to people's houses. So they were, they were tough to control. There were a lot of the Sons of Liberty, like the Adams is, and the Quincys who were more law minded and wanted to write articles and have petitions. But once you got the mob started, it was very hard to stop it. It wasn't one demagogue in that sense, it was the use of a violent mob.
Sam Adams, who was I guess as close to a demagogue in the sense that he wanted to see revolution he said it worked. People resigned their commissions, they were scared and that this was wonderful. But there are a lot of people that thought that this was a terrible way to proceed, however it may have achieved their ends, they really, it was the sort of chaos that they did not wanna see that there was this mob violence.
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