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Would The Founders

Did the Founders think America was a Christian nation? In 1797 the Senate considered a treaty, negotiated the previous year, with the bashaw of Tripoli. The United States agreed to give him cash and presents and declared, in one clause, that America bore “no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen,” for it was “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Tripoli and the countries of North Africa ran a naval protection racket, extorting ransoms for captives they seized or selling their good behavior, in treaties such as this one. North African slavery was horrible, and since the United States could not protect its shipping or its citizens, it found it prudent to pay in advance. Tripoli’s true religion was thievery, but the clause on Christianity and Islam was designed to remove any pretext for trouble. The Senate passed the treaty unanimously, and President Adams signed it three days later. When honor yields to necessity, there is no point quibbling over details. (Four years later the bashaw upped his price and declared war, forcing us to deal with him differently.)

In fact, there was no cause to quibble with the bashaw about creeds. The United States was not founded on the Christian religion. The First Amendment, forbidding a national religious establishment, had been ratified in 1791. The year before, President Washington wrote the congregation of Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, that America did not practice “toleration”; it was not “by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” In 1793 he wrote the Swedenborgian New Church in Baltimore “that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart.” That amendment and these statements are a better guide to the Founders’ views than a treaty with pirates.

Would the Founders back state-sponsored gambling? In February 1826, the last year of his life, Thomas Jefferson asked the Virginia legislature to authorize a lottery. In his petition, he analyzed the morality of games of chance. His first point was startling. “If we consider games of chance immoral, then every pursuit of human industry is immoral; for there is not a single one that is not subject to chance.” Captains risk their ships, and merchants risk their cargoes; farmers bet on the weather, builders bet on the real estate market, hunters bet on the prevalence of game. “These, then, are games of chance. Yet so far from being immoral, they are indispensable to the existence of man.” In one swoop, he overturned all of Benjamin Franklin’s almanac maxims about hard work.

His second thought was more cautious. Trade, farming, and the rest produce real goods when the bet pays off. But games of chance that were pure diversions—Jefferson specified cards, dice, and billiards—“are entirely unproductive.” They were also “so seducing … to men of a certain constitution of mind, that they cannot resist the temptation” of betting on them. In such cases, “as in those of insanity, idiocy, infancy, etc., it is the duty of society to take” gambling addicts “under its protection; even against their own acts, and to restrain their right of choice of these pursuits, by suppressing them entirely.” Jefferson the libertarian saw chance everywhere; Jefferson the republican saw the damage that the pursuit of it sometimes did. The two Jeffersons dueled till the end.

Jefferson concluded that lotteries belonged to a third class of games of chance, those that were harmful if they became habitual but “useful on certain occasions.” The Virginia legislature therefore had the right to permit lotteries on a case-by-case basis and had done so, Jefferson pointed out, for 70 worthy causes from 1782 to 1820, from helping the College of William and Mary to improving the road to Sniggers Gap.

The purpose of Jefferson’s petition was poignant: He was a hundred thousand dollars in debt (almost two million dollars today). He wanted the legislature to permit him to hold a lottery to liquidate part of his estate, in order to save the rest. He was asking for special treatment, and he knew it. One cause of his troubles was the depressed condition of agriculture in Virginia, but every farmer suffered from that. (Another cause of his troubles, his inability to economize, was not something he cared to face—hence, perhaps, his insistence that all economic pursuits are games of chance.) The legislature balked, then relented. Jefferson died in July 1826, hopeful that his heirs would keep something, but the lottery was not a success. His estate was auctioned off six months later.

What would the Founders do about terrorism? Eighteenth-century warfare was supposed to be a civilized affair, with elaborate rules for how prisoners should be treated, exchanged, and paroled. These rules were often honored during the Revolution, but nonetheless the war moved into terror, especially when it was fought in remote or chaotic areas. Frontier warfare, involving Indian allies and enemies, was brutal on both sides. Joseph Brant, a.k.a. Thayendanegea, was a Mohawk chief who led murderous raids on patriot farmers in New York and Pennsylvania, killing women and children as well as soldiers. Brant was no savage—he was a devout Episcopalian who helped translate the Gospel of Mark into Mohawk —but he simply behaved savagely in wartime. George Washington responded by sending Gen. John Sullivan to destroy the Indians’ towns, crops, and “everything that was to be found.” Sullivan, who had the help of friendly Oneidas, laid 40 villages to waste; Brant’s raids only redoubled.

In the South, guerrilla warfare raged between patriots and Loyalists. Gen. Nathanael Greene, sent to retrieve the military situation in the Carolinas in 1781, wrote in shock to his wife, Caty, about what he found there: “The sufferings and distress of the inhabitants beggars [sic] all description… . they persecute each other with little less than savage fury.”

Early in the war Gen. Charles Lee, a radical, eccentric English officer who had settled in Virginia and taken up the American cause, envisioned a guerrilla struggle, involving punitive measures against American Loyalists. Native-born officers like Washington and Greene preferred to rely on a professional army, responsible to the politicians in Congress. No doubt they were motivated in part by pride: They wanted to show the enemy, their former rulers, that they were not rubes leading some ragtag uprising. But they also dreaded the civil commotion that Lee evidently welcomed.

Washington and Greene were right. John Adams guessed that a third of the American people supported the Revolution, a third opposed it, and a third were indifferent. The key factor in shifting those numbers as the war progressed was the brutal conduct of pro-British irregulars. The Americans didn’t always do right, but they did right more often than their enemies, and it did them a lot of good.

What would the Founders do about rogue states? The Founders knew four rogue states, the Muslim principalities of North Africa, known as the Barbary Coast: Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli (Libya). As mentioned earlier, the infant United States paid tribute to keep them from seizing and enslaving American citizens. In 1801 Yussuf Karamanli, the bashaw of Tripoli—a man of “very splendid and tawdry appearance”—became the first foreign ruler to declare war on the United States, hoping to extort higher payments. Thomas Jefferson, newly inaugurated as President, sent almost all the small navy he had to the Mediterranean, to deal with Karamanli.

There were setbacks: The frigate Philadelphia ran aground on a reef in Tripoli Harbor and had to be burned; the crew was enslaved. There were also successes: The Americans took the bashaw’s second-largest town, Derne (now Darnah), with a combined sealand assault. The land assault was particularly heroic: a 500-mile march through the desert from Egypt by a party of Marines, mercenaries, and Muslim allies, led by an impetuous diplomat, William Eaton. (Eaton’s exploit is remembered in the “Marine Corps Hymn”: “to the shores of Tripoli.”) Once Eaton was in Derne and the U.S. Navy was before Tripoli, the bashaw saw reason and returned all his American slaves for $60,000, not the cool million he had originally demanded.

Jefferson congratulated himself on his victory, but it was only temporary. America was soon embroiled with Britain, the greatest maritime power on earth, and the Barbary States resumed the pirate business. In 1815 a new American squadron sailed to the Mediterranean, compelling Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli to forswear piracy and to pay damages for past offenses. President Madison hailed “this demonstration of American skill and prowess.” America was off the hook, but piracy did not finally end until France and the Ottoman Empire occupied the entire Barbary Coast. Then, as now, the three ways of dealing with rogue states were negotiation, force, and overwhelming force.

Would the Founders fight pre-emptive wars? When President Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 for $15 million, his Federalist opponents weren’t pleased. What was good for him, they reasoned, was bad for the country. If pre-emptive war means attacking another country before it attacks us, then Hamilton was in favor of it. But if pre-emptive war means attacking another country without good reason, then he moves out of the pro column.

Alexander Hamilton made a partial exception, writing in the New York Evening Post that the purchase was “an important acquisition,” even though it would “give éclat” (good buzz) to the Jefferson administration. Hamilton’s only quibble was that Jefferson should have taken Louisiana outright. France, which had come under the control of Napoleon Bonaparte, had been preventing Americans from shipping goods down the Mississippi River. Since the American right to use the Mississippi was guaranteed by treaty, Hamilton thought interference was a “justifiable cause of war.” We should have seized New Orleans “at once”; if we had then decided to buy it, we could have set the price.

Would the Founders teach intelligent design? A few of the Founders were doctors, and Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman student of scientific subjects—animals, fossils, Indian languages—but the only Founder who was a true scientist was Benjamin Franklin. It is a delight to look over his shoulder and watch his mind at work. In the corners of a busy life, with the simplest equipment, he performed experiments not only on his signature subject, lightning, which earned him Kant’s compliment as “the new Prometheus,” but also on heat and colors, oil and water, evaporation, hydraulics, and marsh gas. He was curious, clever, and provisional; he was not wedded to old theories: “… a new appearance [phenomenon], if it cannot be explain’d by our old principles, may afford us new ones, of use perhaps in explaining some other obscure parts of natural knowledge.” Nor was he unduly proud of his own efforts: “It may be of use to relate the circumstances even of an experiment that does not succeed, since they may give hints of amendment in future trials: it is therefore I have been thus particular.” He knew that science was a collective enterprise, pursued by researchers confirming or correcting one another’s observations, which is why he cherished his memberships in scientific societies around the world. Franklin being Franklin, he also mocked science, with an insider’s perfect pitch, as in his spoof proposal to the Royal Academy of Brussels that it discover “some drug wholesome & not disagreeable” that would make farts smell like perfume.

One subject Franklin stopped examining after he was a young man was the study of first causes, or metaphysics. “The great uncertainty I found in metaphysical reasonings disgusted me,” Franklin wrote when he was in his seventies, “and I quitted that kind of reading and study for others more satisfactory.” Some of the Founders shared Franklin’s bafflement with metaphysical reasonings (John Adams played with philosophical skepticism; Jefferson clung, rather uneasily, to the evidence of his senses, including his moral sense)—an odd reluctance, since metaphysical reasonings might shed light on important political questions, such as the worth of mankind. The Founders instead took the rights of man as a given or as a discovery of an independent branch of science. “… the rights of mankind,” George Washington wrote, “were better understood and more clearly defined” at the end of the eighteenth century, thanks to the “researches” of “philosophers, sages and legislatures, through a long succession of years.” Sages and legislators were the political equivalents of experimenters like Franklin.

The Founders also looked for the rights of man in religion. In the Declaration, Jefferson appealed, in words as stirring as they were unlocalized, to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Dr. Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration, looked specifically to “the religion of jesus christ.” In a 1786 essay on republican education, Rush wrote that the Genesis account of the creation of man was “the best refutation that can be given to the divine right of kings” and “the strongest argument … in favor of the original and natural equality of all mankind.” If we all are descended from Adam, then none of us can claim to belong to a higher order of beings. Not everyone who read Genesis found the same things in it. Sir Robert Filmer, a seventeenth-century essayist, claimed that Adam’s “lordship … over the whole world” was inherited by kings. Filmer’s arguments were popular enough that John Locke spent many pages refuting them, and they lasted long enough that Tories were still recycling them during the American Revolution. Religious reasonings were as contentious as metaphysical ones; still, some Founders invoked them.

The Founders kept their categories clear. Even when they drew a blank, they knew what they were thinking about. They would not have smuggled metaphysics into science or appealed to natural science to judge questions of religion or human rights. Their design of the branches of knowledge was more intelligent than ours often is.

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