The First Founders: The Puritans

Has it taken this long to get a post up here about the Puritans?

These people are my special field in American history. I find them fascinating, and the more I study the more I realize they are particularly responsible for the founding of the United States as a representative democracy.

This point of view has had its ups and downs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Puritans were mistakenly venerated as democratic people who inevitably created a democratic nation. Since midcentury, this view has been abandoned, and scholars have done a 180 to say the Puritans were freaks who had nothing to do with democracy in America, other than representing the polar opposite of freedom and democracy.

My own research on the Puritans began as I studied the history of the original church in my New England town. I am not a native New Englander, and I didn’t have much interest in the Puritans. But as I studied the history of this church (going back to the 1630s), I became engrossed. Since then, I have devoted my personal research to the Puritans as a whole.

I don’t want to give away my whole paper before I present it, but the kernel of my thesis is that the Puritan reliance on and promotion of lay authority within a context of progress toward salvation was crucial to the development of political culture in New England. The laity had power only within a clearly laid-out system, for specific purposes; it was managed by ministers and could be legitimately wielded only to achieve its specific aims. Sounds like the power of the people within a democracy.

This religious structure carried over to the Puritan legal structure, with elected magistrates and members of the General Court chosen to fulfill the aims of a Puritan polity. When this was hobbled by the revocation of the original charter, and New England became a royal colony under English control, the average New Englander developed a strong loyalty to her Puritan identity as a way of maintaining independence while under English control.

Puritanism was a vital if embattled force in New England through the 1760s, when men like John Adams turned their energies to politics and away from religion because of the infighting going on in the Puritan church.  But even though they chose law over the pulpit, the leaders of our Revolution applied the same logic and purpose of the Puritans to the formation of our democracy.

Well, that’s my thumbnail. Jump in!

Why I don’t talk about black slaves in America

When there was slavery in America, Americans were enslaved. Yes, at first it was Africans who were brought here from Africa and enslaved. But once those Africans had children here in America, who were then enslaved, Americans were enslaving other Americans. And after 1808, when the slave trade was ended here, all enslaved people were Americans.

 I just think that calling enslaved people “black slaves” or “African slaves” or even “African-American slaves” carries water for slavery. It’s human nature to be a little more accepting of harsh treatment for outsiders, for foreigners. We think, Well, if these people were Africans, it’s natural that whites should think enslaving them was acceptable, though of course it wasn’t.

But they weren’t Africans. They were Americans. Americans enslaved by their own people. We got very angry at Saddam Hussein for attacking his own people. Unlike attacking foreigners, attacking your own people is always seen as immediately wrong. That’s why we hesitate to admit we have enslaved our own people. But instead of easing the pain of looking at slavery in the United States by saying blacks or Africans were enslaved, let’s be honest and call it as we know we see it: enslavement of our own people. Did black people who had been enslaved suddenly become Americans in 1865? No.

 (Yes, of course I know that enslaved black Americans were not considered to be legal citizens during slavery. But should I go along with that? If you’re born here, if you move here, if you’re brought here, you are an American.)

So there were enslaved Americans. Not black slaves, or even slaves. I don’t like to use the word “slave”. To me, it validates the concept that people can be changed from people to slaves, things, property. Many people have been and still are enslaved around the world. But no human being is a slave.

These issues of nomenclature may seem small, but we see the huge difference between “pro-abortion” and “pro-choice”. Every little word matters. 

The Second Amendment does NOT protect private gun ownership

Let’s go out on a limb here to state the obvious.

How does it read? “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

A well-regulated Militia. Not a well-armed citizen.

This Amendment is clearly meant to protect the right of the citizen to own a gun to use in military service. You keep your Arms so that you can serve in the Militia. This was written when the main form of defense was state and local militias, for which you needed your own gun.

Now, we’re not strict-interpretation-of-the-Constitution people here at the HP. We believe the Constitution is flexible and can be read in new ways. But this Amendment seems so clearly to be about protecting a volunteer military—to be about military service—that to extend it to people who want to be able to carry guns into a bar or a supermarket, or keep them in their glovebox, is clearly untenable.

The Second Amendment does NOT encourage or demand that average citizens keep guns in their homes for any reason. It does not mention hunting. It does not mention personal defense. It is strictly about maintaining a national army.

John Adams has my vote!

I was reading Adam’s 1797 inaugural speech, where he has this to say about the American people, when faced by the obvious inability of the Articles of Confederation to form a “durable” government for the United States:

“In this dangerous crisis the people of America were not abandoned by their usual good sense, presence of mind, resolution, or integrity. Measures were pursued to concert a plan to form a more perfect union, establish justice… and secure the blessings of liberty. The public disquisitions, discussions, and deliberations issued in the present happy Constitution of Government.”

Just so! As I point out in Truth v. Myth: The Declaration of Independence, the usual course of action when a newborn revolutionary government begins to stumble is to descend into total, bloody civil war, out of which a harsh and reactionary government usually emerges.

Not so in the United States.

Adams goes on to say something that was true of him, and should be true of every president and presidential candidate: “I had the honor to be elected to a station under the new order of things, and I have repeatedly laid myself under the most serious obligations to support the Constitution.”

If we were to vote for presidential candidates based on how much and how well they uphold our laws, our Constitution, our system of government, we would be a much-improved nation. If our lawmakers and politicians were willing to experience serious challenges in their support of our Constitution, we would be a much-improved nation.

For, as Adams asks, “What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?”

A candidate who loves and esteems our form of government. Think of it! Not someone who has a particular agenda, but someone whose particular agenda is motivated by determination to fulfill our mandate as a democratic nation based on promoting natural rights.

That’s who to vote for. Too bad it’s not 1797.

Truth v. Myth: Immigration

Myth: Immigration used to be good, but now it is bad.

Supporting myth:  Today immigrants are shiftless, lazy, and/or criminal, whereas they used to be hardworking people trying to make a better life for their children.

“Proof” of myth: Immigrants today don’t bother to learn English, want Spanish to be the official language of the U.S., and refuse to become legal U.S. citizens, working here illegally instead.

 

You know what I so often hear when Americans talk about immigration now?

 

1. They support anti-immigration laws.

2. Sure, their ancestors were immigrants, and they’re proud of that.

3. But their ancestors “followed the rules,” and therefore deserved to be here, while

4. Immigrants today have not followed the rules, and therefore do not deserve to be here.

 

This is a powerful myth. It seems to ring true. But do you know what the “rules” were for immigrants coming through Ellis Island for so many years? Look healthy and have your name listed on the register of the ship that brought you. That was it. “If the immigrant’s papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (or Great Hall), where doctors would briefly scan every immigrant for obvious physical ailments. Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these ‘six second physicals.’”

 

When I visited the Ellis Island museum in 1991, I saw a film that said you also had to provide the address of a friend, sponsor, or family member who would take you in. And off you went.

 

So I don’t think we’re handing out prizes to past immigrants who followed those rules. They were pretty easy to follow. If that’s all we asked of Mexican immigrants today, we wouldn’t have illegal immigrants.

 

Immigrants today are faced with much more difficult rules. In other words, they actually face rules.

 

Go to Google and type in “requirements for U.S. citizenship.” I don’t know how many million pages come up. You petition for a Green Card—or rather, you have a family member already in the U.S. or a U.S. employer become your petitioner, and fill out the visa petition. Your employer-petitioner has to prove a labor certificate has been granted, that you have the education you need to do the job, that he can pay you, etc.

 

Then you’re on the waiting list—not to get a Green Card, but to apply for a Green Card.

 

I could go on and on. Basically, it’s much harder to get into the U.S. today than it was when most white Americans’ ancestors came through.

 

The problem with immigration today is the same as it was in 1840: each generation of Americans hates and fears the new immigrants coming in. In the 1850s, the Irish were the scary foreigners destroying the nation. In the 1880s it was the Italians. Then the Chinese, then the Eastern Europeans, then the Jews, now the Mexicans.

 

Each generation looks back to earlier immigrants as “good,” and views current immigrants as bad. In the 1880s, the Irish were angry at the incoming Italians. In the 1900s, the Italians were banning the Chinese from coming in. As each immigrant group settles in, it tries to keep the next group out.

 

It’s really time we ended this cycle. Here are some quick pointers:

 

1. Latin American immigrants are not qualitatively different than previous European immigrants.

 

2. Spanish-speaking immigrants do NOT refuse to learn English; in fact, the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants are less likely to speak the old language than the children of other groups (that is, more children of Chinese immigrants speak Chinese than children of Mexican immigrants speak Spanish).

 

3. Latin American immigrants do not all “break the rules” to get into the U.S. They are not all criminals living off the wealth of citizens’ tax dollars.

 

4. Your European immigrant ancestors (and mine!) honored nothing when they came to the U.S. but their desire to be here. They didn’t anxiously adhere to “the rules.” They did the bare, bare minimum that was asked of them, which was easy to do.

 

Immigration will always be with us—thank goodness! The only informed position on the challenges it poses is a historically informed position.

Howard Zinn and Empire

I’ve just read Howard Zinn’s latest article, “Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire.” I admire Howard Zinn, but I feel his critiques of America’s sins go only  halfway.

Zinn seems to have had the same experience learning about American history in school that I did: either you didn’t read anything negative, negative things were blandly presented as neutral, or negatives were horribly presented as positives.

For example, either you didn’t read about the Trail of Tears at all, or you just read something like “The Cherokees were removed from the southeast.” Or, you might even get a small celebration of it, like “Once the Cherokees were removed from the American southeast, settlers could take advantage of the rich land.”

Then, like me and most other people who come to love American history, Zinn started reading on his own, and finding out about the atrocities American governments and people have committed.

But Zinn seems to have accepted these atrocities as evidence that the idea that the United States was founded in an effort to promote justice and freedom is a lie. If you check back to my About page, you can read a fuller explanation of why I think this is a mistake.

Yes, Americans have done terrible things to each other and to other peoples. But those failures to live up to the principles we were founded on are just that–failures to live up to real principles that really were set up to guide our nation and make it a successful experiment in real democracy.

If, like Zinn, you see these failures as proof that America has always been a lie, that we have no real principles to live up to, then I believe you simply give yourself cynical permission to be morally lazy. If America was never really different from any other nation, if it has no uniquely good principles to live up to, then why care if we commit atrocities? Why care if we build an empire? If America has always been bad, how can you change it?

Zinn hopes that we have “reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity”. I get the feeling that he sees this place as a new beginning, to build up from. But we already have a blueprint and platform for living justly in the world–our founding documents, particulary the Constitution and Bill of Rights. We don’t have to make something new and unknown from scratch. We just have to live up to what we already have.

To quote myself, when it comes to our democracy, “we have to keep founding it, over and over, with every generation. Because it is unique. Liberty, equality, and justice for all goes against human nature. A nation founded on those ideals is always in danger of tripping, falling, and giving up. We must always do justice to those difficult ideals and principles for which we stand.”

So to read Zinn is just step one. Read Zinn! Learn the entire history of your nation. Face up to the problems of being an American today. But don’t stop there, depressed and demoralized, feeling like this country is the worst country in the history of the world. Hearken back to the principles we are supposed to uphold, and start upholding them. Then we will indeed reach a point where we can abandon our empire-building and bring good to the world. Like we’re supposed to.

Truth v. Myth: Slavery in our democracy

Myth: Americans didn’t care about slavery, turning an indifferent eye to the sufferings of enslaved people.

Supporting myth:  We enslaved people.

“Proof” of myth: How could slavery go on for so long if people didn’t accept it?

 

How in the world did slavery exist in our representative democracy?

 

The minority of whites in America who enslaved people had a long tradition of looking out for their Lockeian possessions of property and labor. Virginia’s elected colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses, fought the colony’s royal governors constantly, rejecting taxes and other encroachments by the crown on Virginia’s independence—and wealth.

 

So these slaveholders really cared about liberty. No wonder Virginia spawned so many revolutionaries. But how could these men care so much about liberty and still hold slaves? The answer, as Edmund Morgan makes clear in his invaluable book American Slavery, American Freedom, is in a letter from Englishman Sir Augustus John Foster, who visited antebellum Virginia and said, “The Virginians can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves…” (p. 380)

 

Why is this quote the answer to the riddle? Because it mentions mobs.

 

The men and women who ascribed to Locke’s ideas about natural rights applied those rights only to themselves and “their kind”: the wealthy and well-educated. Just as most people do today, Enlightenment thinkers believed that poor people were so crass and animalistic, so driven by the survival instinct, that they were completely unable to appreciate ideals. There was no educating a really poor person. The poor were really barely human.

 

Now when you have this dangerous, large group of uneducated, uneducatable poor people, who outnumber the educated 100,000 to 1, you have to make sure those dangerous poor uneducated people don’t rise up and ruin the status quo. Think about it: if the poor are unable to understand ideas and concepts, then the poor will never understand democracy or natural rights. They can never self-govern like they’re supposed to in a democracy. A democracy requires all of its citizens to be active, informed, self-disciplining (that is, willing to obey the law), and educated (you have to be able to read and write). Since there was “no way” to bring the poor to that level, the poor were nothing but dangerous to democracy. They will instead remain violent, anarchic, and destructive. And they will continue to constitute 98% of the population. 

 

 

So you can’t include those people in democracy; all you can do is contain them. Neutralize their threat. What better way than to enslave them? And indeed, plans for enslaving poor whites were proposed in England in the 1700s.

 

In America, that slavery was not hypothetical. Black Americans were actually enslaved. Slaveholders saw this as a break for democracy. If enslaved, black Americans could not threaten the new republic with their ignorance, violence, and blackness. They were contained.

 

So we go back to Foster’s statement and it makes sense: “The Virginians can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves…” That is, because the masses, which are Negro in this case, are enslaved, they cannot become mobs destroying society and government. The free whites of Virginia are free to embrace democracy and liberty for themselves and their nation because those dangerous poor people are safely contained.

 

Thus we get some Founders who did not see that enslaving black Americans was inconsistent with liberty and justice for all. In fact, in their minds it was crucial to it. Picture a vast machine toiling underground, and a small wagon moving above ground. All that underground toil was required to move the wagon.

 

This is the horrible idea that people were at last starting to doubt in the revolutionary period. The British, after all, had said Americans were a rabble, not really citizens, and clearly unable to govern themselves. The British had been wrong. Now Americans were saying black people were a rabble, not really citizens, unable to govern themselves. Might not the Americans be wrong?

 

Those who felt the Americans were wrong ended their enslavement of black Americans. Those who felt the Americans were not wrong pointed out that they, white Americans, were charged with a beyond-precious responsibility: introducing democracy to the human race. They should be very cautious about offering citizenship in that democracy to people who were “incapable of defending it and might become a means of destroying it. If the poor were already enslaved, would it not be wise to keep them so?” (p. 385) What was worse: enslaving 200,000 people in Virginia, or setting them loose on the nation, to beg in the streets and join mobs and become henchmen for or dupes of unscrupulous politicians who would use their mob power to seize control of the government and revert it to dictatorship?

 

Think about it, said the pro-slavery skeptics. Most black Americans are uneducated, desperate, and friendless. The first white person who gives them a buck and a drink will win their undying loyalty. And if that white person asks them to loot a store or raze the postmaster’s office or kill the governor, what black person wouldn’t want to wreak some revenge on the whites who enslaved him? Black people have a chip on their shoulder, said the skeptics. Set them loose with no skills and hearts full of anger, and you’re not going to like what you see.

 

We’d love to end slavery, they said. We see that it’s not consistent with democracy’s principles. But it’s just too late to undo slavery’s ill effects, so you have to choose: the problems slavery causes (a sometimes guilty conscience), or the problems ending slavery will cause (rioting, rape, murder, fire, dictatorship). Which will you choose?

 

These were repellent yet powerful arguments during the revolutionary and founding period. Like democracy itself, ending slavery was for many whites a radical experiment whose outcome no one knew for sure.

 

So how could slavery exist in our democracy? With difficulty. Even as many Americans (increasingly located in the southern states) argued that it was crucial to democracy, more and more Americans were coming to realize, often uncomfortably, that slavery was a slap in the face to democracy. The argument would not end, the nation would not rest easy about slavery—ever. It would not be long—the span of one long life—before the compromises with slavery in the 1787 constitution tore the union’s political system apart, and culminated in civil war.

 

 

Myth: Americans didn’t care about slavery, turning an indifferent eye to the sufferings of enslaved people.

Truth:  There was never a time in the life of the United States when slavery was not a tough issue.

Damage done when we believe in a myth: Believing this myth makes us think we will never end racism and prejudice, because America has always callously embraced both; that Americans just don’t care about equality, and it’s impossible to get justice in America. But if we believe this, we’re just giving ourselves permission to be prejudiced and racist. It’s permission to be inactively angry, to say that criticizing the U.S. as hopelessly hypocritical is actually an action. But it’s not. Cynicism is lazy, and if you see racism and prejudice, you have to fight it, not say “Oh, that’s just how America is.” Because it isn’t now, and it wasn’t then. That’s not the American way.

The Constitution and Slavery

We the people… whenever we see it, we ask ourselves who they were. We ask ourselves about slavery. Just like the Founders did.

 

For people who are often accused of “not caring” about slavery, the Founders spilled a lot of ink arguing about it. Just as the Declaration of Independence dealt with slavery, so did the Constitution. People still thought and hoped slavery was just about to die on its own. But since it hadn’t died, yet, the same problem arose as had arisen in 1776: how do we deal with slavery when founding a nation on natural rights?

 

Well, the answer is to get rid of slavery. So why didn’t they?

 

Because the slaveholding states threatened to break up the Union if slavery was abolished. The question at the time was, do you want an imperfect United States or no United States at all? The states in which slavery was protected, where slavery was crucial to the state economy and social structure (almost all southern states), were serious in their answer. They were not about to remain part of a union that abolished slavery.

 

When you look at all the demands slave states made at the Constitutional Convention, you see both how radically they would have changed the United States, and how hard antislavery delegates had to fight to control them. Slaveholding states wanted to maintain or expand the slave trade (keep slave ships going to and from Africa) and hopefully take it over and run it themselves, supplying the world with enslaved people. They wanted no federal restrictions on slavery in the western territories, and a specific section of the Constitution prohibiting any federal restriction of the rights of slaveholders—that is, a guaranty that slavery would not just be allowed, but allowed to flourish. It was clear that the southern states would leave the union if a national emancipation policy was ever attempted. See Joseph Ellis’ fantastic book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation for a full examination of this.

 

So we see that it wasn’t so much “the Founders” or “uncaring northerners” or even “the Constitution” that allowed slavery to exist. It was a concrete group of southern slaveholding delegates and politicians, led by James Madison, who threatened to leave the Union and destroy it if slavery was not protected.

 

We know that organizing representation to Congress was the biggest headache facing the delegates, and slavery was part of it. The solution of the three-fifths clause, which counted three-fifths of the number of enslaved Americans as population, is shameful. But antislavery delegates accepted it, relying on the imminent death of slavery to make the question moot, and again, unwilling to sacrifice the entire experiment of America over slavery. Their feeling was, get the nation stabilized, and then we can perfect it. We see that as a cop-out, but at least it came after 12 years of constant churn and effort. We often lose our collective will today after much less time and almost no effort at all.

 

While slavery was protected from abolition by the Constitution, and the slave trade could not be abolished for 20 years after ratification (1808), the document itself never uses the word slavery. Why? Because people were embarrassed and ashamed to put that word into the Constitution. Because they knew it was wrong. Just as the Declaration put in Happiness instead of Property, the Constitution put in interests instead of slavery.

 

The Constitution was written; now it had to be ratified by popularly elected state legislatures. And here’s where we see that it wasn’t a small group of rich white wig-wearers who dictated the course of American history.

 

The American public was utterly passionate about the Constitution. They weren’t going to just ratify whatever they were given. And they weren’t going to let the issue get strangled in red-tape and delay. In short, they didn’t leave it to the politicians. In Pennsylvania, when the state assembly fell short of a quorum to call a state ratifying convention, a mob dragged two assemblymen from their homes to the State house, forcing them to stay while the assembly voted.

 

Americans also clamored for a Bill of Rights. Why? Because they wanted those original natural rights to be explicitly protected by the new government. Americans were not pretending to carry the revolution from the battlefield to the legislature; they were really doing it.

 

With human rights on their minds, Americans faced the compromises over slavery. Most were not happy with them. But in the end, most Americans agreed that the experiment was not worth abandoning over slavery. Again, we recognize this as a failure today, knowing that it would take a civil war to end slavery, but it is actually true that in 1787, many antislavery (and some proslavery) Americans believed slavery would die out within a generation. And what would guarantee that process more firmly than establishing a democratic union? What good would it do to insist on abolishing slavery now, thought people in 1787, thus driving the southern states out of the union? That way, slavery was guaranteed to go on in the south, in whatever nation was created there. But if those southern states were coaxed into the democratic union, slavery would end. Northern states were passing gradual emancipation acts; so would the south.

 

The Constitution was ratified, but it was close. The nation was established. It was a remarkable achievement. We’ve seen that the nation really was founded on revolutionary ideals, and that all those ideals were not betrayed by the Founders. The inclusion of slavery in the new nation was a problem and a mistake, but it was not the result of apathy or complacence. Slavery was protected because the Founders, and most Americans, could not bear to destroy the nation by abolishing slavery and losing the southern states of the union.

 

Today, we think that would have been preferable. Why not just lose the south and create a free union with the states that were left? It would have been better. But in reality, if the southern states had seceded in 1787, the likelihood of the remaining states banding together was small. We’ve seen that the states had only the loosest ties with each other, and almost no loyalty to each other. If some left, others would go, too, unable to resist the lure of individual sovereignty. Americans at the time knew this.

 

The Constitution sums up the achievements of the Founding Generation, both the men in the paintings and the people at large. No people had ever formed a working government based on natural rights before. Hammering out ways to guaranty fair representation to the government, prevent government tyranny, and protect individual rights was blood, sweat, and tears difficult. Ending slavery, so insidiously entwined in southern American life and northern American commerce, “was a challenge on the same gigantic scale as these achievements.” [Ellis 108] It was not done in one generation, not even a generation so remarkable as the Founding Generation. But the wheels were set in motion. A person born in 1787 could live to see the Civil War fought, and slavery ended; the span of one long life was all it took to finally make good on the Constitution’s promise of liberty and equality.

 

So. Can you be proud of the Founders of your nation? Yes. Absolutely. They did the impossible. And by Founders I mean all Americans, not just the men in the paintings. The Founding Generation. The challenge of creating the United States was mind-boggling. We take it for granted today. We take the intelligence and creativity and passion and struggle of the Founding generation for granted. As if the rules were clear and they just had to write them down.

 

But America is exceptional. An exception to all rules. We were the first people to found a long-term working government dedicated to the preservation of natural rights. Today as I write, nations with this form of government are still in the minority. It’s very hard to live up to the principles of natural rights. We fail at it all the time. But we do also succeed at it. And we have a responsibility to do so.

The Constitution: harder than it looks

We kind of hate the Constitution today. We wish it wasn’t so elastic. It allows for so many interpretations; we wish it would just tell us what to do. But of course the only reason it’s a viable document is that it doesn’t tell us what to do.  It gives us a framework of justice to apply to specific instances, and it’s not the document’s fault if we sometimes use its safe space for evil. That’s our fault. We make that choice.

 

“We the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of this liberty to ourselves, and to our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution, of the United States of America.”

Most of us are familiar with this long sentence. Perhaps you, like me,  learned it on Schoolhouse Rock, and prefer to sing it. But by now, you may see the revolutionary principles and ground-breaking ideals in it more clearly.

 

After years of trying not to have a real centralized government, and years of trying to put state interests below national interests while keeping individual interests above national and state interests, we get this line. We, the people (not the states) of America, realize that if we want to make this experiment work, and if we want to experience the best government ever attempted in human history, we have to create and honor a binding legal document that establishes a unified, federal government.

 

The year is 1787. The Articles of Confederation have been in place for 10 years. The Revolutionary War ended in 1783, so we have been an independent nation for just four years. All in all, Americans have been in turmoil for 12 years. This is the point at which most new governments fall apart and the descent into civil war and terror begins. But we fulfilled the principles of our revolution, and peacefully assembled delegates to work together to write a new Constitution.

 

Even that majority of Americans who did not want a powerful central government were persuaded that it was necessary to keep the states from dissolving the union. They sent delegates to Philadelphia to figure out how to create a government strong enough to protect its people, but bound enough by principles of natural rights not to turn to tyranny.

 

These delegates were not the famous men who signed the Declaration. Adams was not there; Jefferson was not there. The delegates were mostly unknowns; lawyers, farmers, businessmen. They were not professional politicians. But they were those well-read, revolutionary Americans the rest of the world marveled at. Those men produced a great document because they put themselves second to the ideal of America. They had their moment of absolute power and used it to enshrine natural rights.

 

We all remember learning about the debates over how to make sure big and small states were equally represented in Congress, the federal government. We feel bored, again because we know how it ended, and the solution is so obvious, it just seems stupid to waste time reading about how they took so long to figure it out.

 

But the point of those debates about representation is not what ideas were tossed around, and which idea finally won out. It’s that the debates happened at all. We’ve already established that most revolutionary governments quickly implode. Here, faced with a real problem, with no clear answer (despite all our hindsight insisting it was clear), delegates to the convention insisted on figuring out what the best solution was,  on coming up with a solution that really lived up to the principles of the revolution. Instead of saying “We can’t fix this; there’s no solution that everyone will agree on”, and getting out their guns and starting a civil war, these delegates put themselves through hours of philosophical debate in a stiflingly hot room until they fulfilled the trust put in them.

 

The Founders didn’t “know” that the average American had to consent to this government for it to work; they decided that the average American had to do so, and they subordinated themselves to that purpose. And so they created, as delegate Peirce Butler said, “not the best government they could devise, but the best the people would receive.”

 

The Articles of Confederation: Not Totally Lame!

The problem the Founders grappled with when writing the Articles of Confederation was how to create a workable government without authorizing a tyranny. How do you keep life, liberty, and happiness for all while subjecting all to a central authority which must make general laws?

 

We’re so used to hearing about this struggle that it bores us, because we know the problem was eventually solved by the Constitution. It’s like knowing how a book ends before you read it. There’s no suspense for us. No tension. Plus, with hindsight, the solutions the Constitution came up with seem so obvious. But think about it. Usually  new governments struggle not with how to make everyone happy, but with individuals fighting for power. Each revolutionary leader is fighting to establish his faction, to grab power. The people are just a labor source, mob power, or cannon fodder.

 

But in America, the argument, struggle, and problem was not how to get power but how to give it away. How to have a workable government that didn’t trample people’s natural rights. The Founders would not take the easy way out and just give someone power to tell the people what to do. They wouldn’t even allow an executive branch to be created, because they were afraid if power was represented by the body of one person, he would become a dictator not only from his own greed, but because the people themselves would gladly give up their rights to a powerful leader. The Founders resisted the urge to fall back on the familiar.

 

And all this in a time of war. The Revolution was not going well in 1777, when the Articles of Confederation were written. If ever there was a time when people might be forgiven for assigning power to one person who could unify and lead them, it was then. But even in this time of ultimate crisis, when the federal government was broke and could not pay Washington or his army, the men who were dying for the independence of America, the Founders would not institute unfair taxes, would not assign an executive, would not give up on trying to establish a fair government, would not give up on the ideals of revolution. War is usually the ultimate excuse for abuse of power, or failure to live up to high ideals. Not for the Founders.

 

And, when the Founders finally had the Articles of Confederation, and saw that they just didn’t create the best government for the people, they came back and went through the whole agonizing process again, and wrote a new set of rules—the Constitution. That’s dedication. That’s inspiration. That’s stamina.

 

So instead of seeing a string of half-assed failures leading up to the Constitution, we should see a gritty resolve to make the dream a reality that no amount of hardship could weaken.