Home : For The People :

The Founding Fathers' Sacred Honor

On July 4, in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress brought a new nation into the world by adopting the Declaration of Independence. The drama had begun on June 7, when Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced a resolution calling for the colonies to sever themselves from Great Britain. A divided Congress left the question open but appointed a committee to prepare a declaration. On July 2 the Congress made the momentous and irrevocable decision to declare independence, and two days later, after making a few changes, it adopted the committee’s text, which had been written mostly by Thomas Jefferson.

The Declaration is at once a bold pronouncement and a humble apology, mixing combative words like “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” and “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government” with emollients like “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” “Prudence, indeed, will dictate,” and “the patient sufferance of these Colonies.” This balancing act was made necessary by the Declaration’s multiple purposes. Abroad, America needed to justify its boldness to foreign rulers, from whom the infant country hoped to attract aid and recognition, without making them sit uneasily on their own thrones. At home, the Congress needed to rally citizens behind the cause of self-rule without encouraging them to split up again when the first dispute arose.

For these reasons, the true soul of the Declaration of Independence lies not in the elegant passages at the beginning and end but in the middle portion’s mundane bill of particulars. By listing in exhaustive detail the depredations of King George III and stressing the patience with which the colonists had borne them, the Congress hoped to discourage other rebels from acting too precipitately. Unfortunately, in years since, Jefferson’s rousing phrases about unalienable rights and self-evident truths have proved timeless, while the catalogue of injustices has been all too easy to ignore. If the Declaration of Independence is, to quote the title of Pauline Maier’s recent book, “American scripture,” then the list of offenses is the begats. The result, much too often, has been that revolutionaries at home and abroad have tried to overthrow governments without carefully weighing their grievances and exhausting their forbearance.

The Founding Fathers had their shortcomings, but when you consider their achievements, the desire to erect marble statues of them and haul busloads of sullen and inattentive schoolchildren to their birthplaces becomes understandable.

Jefferson’s terms as governor of Virginia, Secretary of State, and President all ended badly (or worse). We remember Jefferson mainly as a writer who gracefully expressed the ideals Americans continue to share. Even there, however, he is often given credit for more than he did. Take, for example, his most famous sentence, the line from the Declaration of Independence that begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” then affirms that “all men are created equal” and have “unalienable rights.” For Jefferson, those phrases led to an assertion of the right of revolution, which was the point of the passage. Our Declaration is that of nineteenth-century Americans who separated the Declaration’s statements on equality and rights from the rest of the document and transformed a revolutionary manifesto into a standard of freedom to be realized over time, steadily improving the lot of “all people of all colors everywhere,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. Yet many Americans, like Lincoln, give Jefferson credit for the Declaration as we understand it, as if, God-like, he fore- saw the use future generations would make of his words. Alas, it was not so. Jefferson went to his grave doubting that American whites and free blacks could ever live together in peace, much less on a basis of equality. He wasn’t all that great on women either.

Two or three decades ago Thomas Jefferson might have been a plausible candidate for most overrated Founder—but not now. Sally Hemings, his alleged courtesan, and James Callender, his noxious scribe, have left Jefferson’s once godlike reputation in shreds. If anything, we need to remind ourselves that the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence, designed Monticello, created the Democratic party, orchestrated the Louisiana Purchase, and founded the University of Virginia was not a run-of-the-mill jerk.

Franklin is highly rated for the wrong reasons and therefore underrated for his real achievements. He is remembered for the lightning rod and for his avuncular advice to everybody about frugality and industry. ’ The lightning rod was an important invention, but it was less significant than his theoretical contributions, which laid the foundation for subsequent understanding of electricity. For example, he was the first to identify positive and negative current. Americans have never granted him the intellectual recognition that Europeans of his time did, a difference symbolized by the fact that news of his death was officially marked in France, but not in the United States, as a day of mourning.

Franklin’s advice about frugality and industry was not what he would have wished to be remembered for. He did not follow it himself in retiring from business at the age of forty-two. As a Founding Father he is recognized as the principal negotiator of the treaty with France that made American independence possible. But he is not recognized for the long years he spent before that in England, stating the position of the American colonies within the empire, until it became apparent that independence was the only way to secure American rights. Although he had little to say at the convention that formed the United States Constitution, he had had much to do with formulating Americans’ perception of what rights the Constitution ought to protect.

Is the badness of the few bad eggs among them overrated by contrast? Not in the case of the traitor Benedict Arnold. He had great abilities, slight cause, and the chance of doing huge damage (his plan was to hand over West Point, with George Washington and his staff in it). What about the accused and acquitted traitor Aaron Burr? When he began plotting in the West in Thomas Jefferson’s second term, he too had great abilities (courage, charm, smarts) and slight cause (pique, land hunger, desire for glory). But how great a danger was he? The historian Henry Adams, relying on the dispatches of Anthony Merry, the British ambassador at the time, with whom Burr was in contact, depicted a hair-raising scheme of secession. But Merry, not the brightest gem in Britannia’s crown, was making himself look important in London by taking Burr’s talk at face value. A few grand juries and a police action rolled up Burr’s plot, whatever it was. Burr may have had no principles, but he also didn’t have much of a plan. He was a narcissist, vamping through daydreams. No Great Satan, only a louse.

The author of the Constitution is Gouverneur Morris. Since the peg-legged New Yorker died in 1816, there have been only nine books on him (two in French). When I bought my copy of the earliest (published in 1832), I found that it had been owned by a public library and that the pages were uncut. Yet Morris was smart, funny, hardworking, loyal (to all but his many girlfriends), and an eyewitness to two revolutions (the American and the French). His life was full of pain and controversy: He lost a leg and scorched an arm; half his family were Tories, many of his French friends were exiled or guillotined, and he became a Northern secessionist during the War of 1812. Yet he never lost his good humor. He is the first Founding Father you would call if you were in jail, were broke, or needed to fill a dinner table. I have recently finished writing the tenth book on him, and there are more in the offing, so maybe his ship is coming in at last.

By definition, Francis Bacon said in his Essays, “founders of States and Common-Wealths” take “first place” in the race of fame. When the founders in question create one of the freest and at the same time most stable commonwealths in history, the question becomes even trickier. How do you overrate George Washington’s virtue? Unlike Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, and Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington never sought supreme power for himself, even when, arguably, it was within his reach.

Begin with the tag “Father of the Constitution.” It’s enormously misleading. No one man sired the Constitution; that precious parchment was instead the result of the joint efforts of more than 50 men who attended the Philadelphia convention. The document that emerged in 1787 reflected no one man’s vision or grand design; the Constitution was, on the contrary, the product of dealmaking, horse-trading, and compromise. A number of James Madison’s own recommendations were rejected by the convention. True, he kept the best records of the proceeding, but any court stenographer today could do as well. And yes, he gave a lucid exposition of the meaning of various constitutional provisions in the Federalist Papers, but so too did Alexander Hamilton.

When in the 1790s Hamilton laid out a brilliant scheme for restoring the young Republic to fiscal health, Madison balked. Where, he asked, did the Constitution authorize Congress to create a bank? Hamilton responded by citing the arguments in Madison’s own Federalist No. 44, in which Madison maintained that many powers are granted to Congress by “implication” in the Constitution. Later Madison flirted with the wrongheaded idea that states can ignore federal laws they don’t like. As Secretary of State under Jefferson, he helped engineer the notorious embargo—a proscription of all foreign trade—which swiftly destroyed a large part of the American economy. Then came his Presidency, during which the British sacked Washington and set fire to the White House and the Capitol. No wonder, if the gossip of the day can be believed, President Madison rarely went to bed sober.

No one today thinks of James Wilson of Pennsylvania as the father of anything. He was not a glamorous figure, but Wilson packed a vast amount of brainpower behind his high brow and thick spectacles. Born in Carskerdy, Scotland, he studied at St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh before emigrating to America in the 1760s. He studied law under John Dickinson, bought a, farm near Carlisle, Pennsylvania—a Scotch-Irish enclave —and became an influential lawyer specializing in (and profiting from) land deals. In 1776 he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; 11 years later he was a delegate to the Philadelphia convention that drafted the Constitution. Wilson spoke at almost every session in Philadelphia—more often, indeed, than Madison himself. Later he served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where his practice of writing clear, cogent opinions is said to have influenced the great Chief Justice John Marshall. Sadly, he died in 1798 a broken man, ruined by speculation and hopelessly in debt.

His achievement was threefold. First, he brought with him to America the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment, a far more beneficent approach to the organization of human affairs than the French one (which, thanks to the celebrity of smart alecks like Voltaire, has long gotten the lion’s share of attention in textbooks and college history surveys). The French philosophes wanted to perfect mankind, and to this end they developed a variety of unworkable or despotic schemes in which enlightened mandarins would decide what was best for the world. Very different was the approach of Scottish philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith. They studied man as he was and drew attention to those humble but useful practices (like commerce) that enable men to live peacefully and prosperously. James Wilson was at the forefront of those Americans who, in the tradition of Hume, Smith, and the great British judge Lord Mansfield, wanted to make American commercial codes more efficient.

Second, Wilson was a strong nationalist. He knew that if America remained a weak confederation of semi-sovereign states, a truly free, continental market in goods and ideas (like the one we now enjoy) could never come into being. To this end he worked with Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris to create a stronger national government. He was one of the most influential delegates to the Philadelphia convention, where his legal learning, knowledge of history, and powers of public speaking commanded respect.

Finally, he was one of the earliest and most articulate proponents of judicial review, the theory that Chief Justice Marshall enshrined in Marbury v. Madison and a practice that on more than one occasion has proved to be a bulwark of liberty against government encroachment. A constitution doesn’t amount to much if the legislature is free to disregard it. Still, if Wilson deserves credit for pointing out the benefits of judicial review, he was less conscious of its dangers. He envisioned the Supreme Court as a kind of “council of revision,” in which justices would act as veritable philosopher-kings and strike down laws not only for constitutional reasons but on policy grounds as well. Such an approach anticipated the kind of antidemocratic judicial activism that the Harvard law professor James Bradley Thayer warned against more than a century ago. A man with many good ideas and a couple of bad ones, James Wilson is one Founder who ought to be better known.

Until we build the monument to Thomas Paine on the Mall in Washington, D.C., authorized by Congress in 1992 —that is, until we officially admit Paine into the top rank of the Founding Fathers—I will continue to contend that all the usual suspects, yes, all of them are overrated.

If, as I believe, the world-historic importance of the American Revolution and founding of the United States—for all the tragedy and irony that our nation’s development has entailed —has been about the advancement of freedom, equality, and democracy, then we must surely conclude that the great patriots are comparatively overrated. The Virginians—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—were slaveholders. In fact, for all of Jefferson’s talk of the necessity of a “little rebellion now and then,” he didn’t even trust white artisans, while Adams and Hamilton, as well as Morris, not only scorned working people but also remained hostile to the idea of popular democratic politics. We cannot explain America’s democratic dynamic and greatness by way of the traditional cohort of Founding Fathers.

Although the powerful, propertied, and pious no longer try to suppress Thomas Paine’s memory, as they did for almost 200 years, Paine definitely remains our most underrated Founder. The son of an English artisan, he came to America in 1774 at the age of 37, bearing in one hand a curriculum vitae that registered an elementary education and aborted careers as a corset maker, privateer, preacher, teacher, tax collector, and labor activist, but, more important, in the other, a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he knew through artisan and scientific circles in London.

Struck by America’s magnificent possibilities, moved by the spiritedness of its people, and suddenly offered a career as a magazine editor and writer, Paine dedicated himself to the American cause and—through pamphlets like Common Sense and The Crisis and words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and “These are the times that try men’s souls”—he not only turned America’s colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war but also, to the chagrin of the more conservative of the patriots, defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion and projected an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.

Paine’s Common Sense (January 1776) explained to Americans, north and south, urban and rural, high and low, enlightened and evangelical, what they were fighting against and what they were fighting for; and his Crisis Papers (the first in December 1776) renewed and sustained America’s Revolutionary spirit when the struggle seemed doomed. Arguably, if David McCullough is right about 1776 being our most fateful year, then Paine’s great pamphlets stand, alongside the Declaration and the Constitution, as our most important texts. And yet there’s more: Paine’s unwavering commitment to American independence and national solidarity led him to enlist in Washington’s army (1776), serve as secretary to Congress’s Committee on Foreign Affairs (1777–79), write Public Good (1780; a work that helped resolve the serious dispute among the states over the question of Western land claims), and join in a dangerous diplomatic mission to Paris seeking additional French aid (1781).

Paine firmly believed that America possessed extraordinary potential: “The birthday of a new world is at hand.” But he did not see that potential as belonging to Americans alone: “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” Paine often called himself a “citizen of the world.” But the United States always remained paramount in his thoughts and evident in his labors, and his later writings have continued to shape American events and developments from the 1790s to the present.

Endowing American experience with democratic impulse and aspiration, Paine in 1776 turned Americans into radicals, and we have remained radicals at heart ever since. Rebels, reformers, and critics such as Lorenzo Dow, Frances Wright, Thomas Skidmore, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, Jeremiah Simpson, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs, and innumerable others right down to the present generation would regularly rediscover Paine’s life and labors and draw ideas, inspiration, and encouragement from them as they themselves sought to extend American freedom, equality, and democracy.

President Andrew Jackson once observed that “Thomas Paine needs no monument made by hands; he has erected a monument in the hearts of all lovers of liberty.” Agreed. But in these new “times that try men’s souls,” erecting the promised memorial to Paine in the nation’s capital is the least we should do, not so much for his sake as for our own.

---

top of page

back a page