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Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit? Is there any arrangement of government—any constitution—by which it’s possible for a people to rule themselves, justly and fairly, and as equals, through the exercise of judgment and care? Or are their efforts, no matter their constitutions, fated to be corrupted, their judgment muddled by demagoguery, their reason abandoned for fury?
THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT rests on three political ideas—“these truths,” Thomas Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.
What does the past teach?
History is the study of what remains, what’s left behind, which can be almost anything, so long as it survives the ravages of time and war:
But China was the richest country in the world, and by the late fifteenth century no longer allowed travel beyond the Indian Ocean, on the theory that the rest of the world was unworthy and uninteresting.
Columbus did not make a catalogue of the ways and beliefs of the people he met (only later did he hire Pané to do that). Instead, he decided that the people he met had no ways and beliefs. Every difference he saw as an absence.22 Insisting that they had no faith and no civil government and were therefore infidels and savages who could not rightfully own anything, he claimed possession of their land, by the act of writing.
the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve—these stories would be unknown, or hardly known, if they hadn’t been written down or recorded.
Modernity began when people fighting over which of these stories was true began to think differently about the nature of truth, about the nature of the past, and about the nature of rule.
In 1215, barons rebelling against the king captured the Tower of London.32 When John agreed to meet with them to negotiate a peace and they gathered at Runnymede, a meadow by the Thames, the barons presented him with a very long list of demands, which were rewritten as a charter, in which the king granted “to all free men” in his realm—that is, not to the people, but to noblemen—“all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs.”33 This was the great charter, the Magna Carta.
Magna Carta had been revoked almost immediately after it was written, and it had become altogether obscure by the time of King James and his battles with the ungovernable Edward Coke. But Coke, as brilliant a political strategist as he was a legal scholar, resurrected it in the 1620s and began calling it England’s “ancient constitution.”
Coke’s resurrection of Magna Carta explains a great deal about how it is that some English colonists would one day come to believe that their king had no right to rule them and why their descendants would come to believe that the United States needed a written constitution.
New York, the busiest port on the mainland, where African slaves owned by the Dutch had once built a wall at the edge of town, and African slaves owned by the English had taken it down, leaving Wall Street behind.
What happened in New York in the 1730s and 1740s set a pattern in American politics. At Horsmanden’s urging, more than 150 black men in the city were arrested, thrown in prison, and interrogated.
The Zenger trial and the New York slave conspiracy were much more than a dispute over freedom of the press and a foiled slave rebellion: they were part of a debate about the nature of political opposition, and together they established its limits. Both Cosby’s opponents and Caesar’s followers allegedly plotted to depose the governor. One kind of rebellion was celebrated, the other suppressed—a division that would endure.
“The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small,” Franklin began. As he saw it, Africans were “black”; Asians and Native Americans were “tawny”; Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, Swedes, and Germans were “swarthy.” That left very few people, and chiefly the English, as the only “white people” in the world.
And yet this defiance did not extend to Quebec, or to the sugar islands, where the burden of the Stamp Tax was actually heavier. Thirteen colonies eventually cast off British rule; some thirteen more did not.
Brilliant and unstable, Otis would later lose his mind (before his death in 1783, when he was struck by lightning, he had taken to running naked through the streets).
Slavery, Otis insisted, “is the most shocking violation of the law of nature,” and a source of political contamination, too. “Those who every day barter away other men’s liberty, will soon care little for their own,” he warned.43
John Adams estimated that about a third of colonists were patriots, a third were Loyalists, and a third never really made a decision about independence.
Mason’s original draft hadn’t included the clause about rights being acquired by men “when they enter into a state of society”; these words were added after members of the convention worried that the original would “have the effect of abolishing” slavery.76 If all men belonging to civil society are free and equal, how can slavery be possible? It must be, Virginia’s convention answered, that Africans do not belong to civil society, having never left a state of nature. Within eighteenth-century political thought, women, too, existed outside the contract by which civil society was formed.
From Massachusetts, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in March of 1776, wondering whether that might be remedied. “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors,” she began, alluding to the long train of abuses of men over women. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” she told him. She spoke of tyranny: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” And she challenged him to follow the logic of the principle of representation: “If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are
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that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government.”
In September 1783, the American delegation signed the Treaty of Paris. Britain agreed to recognize the independence and sovereignty of the United States.
Massachusetts’s constitution insisted on a right to revolution, decreeing that when the government fails the people, “the people have a right to alter the government, and to take measures necessary for their safety, prosperity and happiness.”
For all the veneration of the “people,” the word “democracy” retained an unequivocally negative connotation. Eighteenth-century Americans borrowed from Aristotle the idea that there are three forms of government: a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a polity; governments by the one, the few, and the many. Each becomes corrupt when the government seeks to advance its own interests rather than the common good. A corrupt monarchy is a tyranny, a corrupt aristocracy an oligarchy, and a corrupt polity a democracy.
The way to avoid corruption is to properly mix the three forms so that corruption in any one would be restrained, or checked, by the others. Between
The Declaration of Rights in Vermont’s 1777 constitution specifically banned slavery: men might be indented as servants till the age of twenty-one, or women till the age of eighteen, but no one past that age could be held in bondage. (This provision would have made Vermont the first state to abolish slavery, except that in 1777 Vermont was not a state but an independent republic; it would not join the United States until 1791.) In
Franklin’s newly enlarged house, its growth a measure of his own rise. As he explained to his sister, he’d built an addition and installed a door in his bedroom by which he could enter directly into his library, even in slippers and robe.
The Constitution drafted in Philadelphia acted as a check on the Revolution, a halt to its radicalism; if the Revolution had tilted the balance between government and liberty toward liberty, the Constitution shifted it toward government.
When Madison argued about the inevitability of a majority oppressing a minority, he cited ancient history, and told of how the rich oppressed the poor in Greece and Rome. But he cited, too, modern American history. “We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, the ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”
Connecticut compromise, establishing equal representation in the Senate, with two senators for each state, and proportionate representation in the House of Representatives, with one representative for every 40,000 people (at the very last minute this number was changed to 30,000).
As Morris pointed out, the delegates were there to build a republic, but there was nothing more aristocratic than slavery. He called it “the curse of heaven.”48 The Constitution would not lift that curse. Instead, it tried to hide it. Nowhere do the words “slave” or “slavery” appear in the final document.
“What will be said of this new principle of founding a right to govern Freemen on a power derived from slaves,” Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson wondered—correctly, as it would turn out. He predicted: “The omitting the Word will be regarded as an Endeavour to conceal a principle of which we are ashamed.”49
“For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.” But wasn’t humility the best course, in such circumstances? “Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution,” he closed, “because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.”50
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The promise of America, Jefferson thought, was that “the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone.”
Hamilton determined that the United States should have unshakable credit. The nation’s debts would be honored: private debt could be forgiven. In the new republic, individual debts—the debts of people who took risks—could be discharged. Pintard got out of debtors’ prison by availing himself of a 1798 New Jersey insolvency law; later, he filed for bankruptcy under the terms of the first U.S. bankruptcy law, passed in 1800.82 He was legally relieved of the obligation ever to repay his debts, his ledger erased. The replacement of debtors’ prison with bankruptcy protection would change the nature
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Jefferson and Madison, who founded the Democratic-Republican Party, believed that the fate of the Republic rested in the hands of farmers; Hamilton and the Federalist Party believed that the fate of the Republic rested in the development of industry.
Americans read their Washington. And they looked at him, in prints and portraits. One popular print, Washington Giving the Laws to America, showed the archangel Gabriel in the heavens carrying an American emblem while Washington, dressed in a Roman toga and seated among the gods, holds a stylus in one hand and, in his other hand, a stone tablet engraved with the words, “The American Constitution.”99 It was as if the Constitution had been handed down from the heavens, tablets etched out of stone, sacred and infallible, from God to the first American president. Where were the centuries of ideas
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The Electoral College was a concession to slave owners, an affair of both mathematical and political calculation.
The campaigning went on for rather a long time, partly because there was no single national election day in 1800. Instead, voting stretched from March to November. Voting was done in public, not in secret. It also hardly ever involved paper and pen, and counting the votes—another affair of calculation—usually meant counting heads or, rather, counting polls. A “poll” meant the top of a person’s head.
in places where voting was done by ballot, casting a ballot generally meant tossing a ball into a box.
The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish a religion would be “to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.”28 These were neither casual omissions nor accidents; they represented an intentional disavowal of a constitutional relationship between church and state, a disavowal that was not infrequently
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In 1797, John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, securing the release of American captives in North Africa, and promising that the United States would not engage in a holy war with Islam because “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”29 But during the Second Great Awakening, evangelicals recast the nation’s origins as avowedly Christian. “Upon what was America founded?” Maria Stewart asked, and answered, “Upon religion and pure principles.”
The separation of church and state allowed religion to thrive; that was one of its intentions.
In 1816, when Jefferson was seventy-three and the awakening was just beginning, he warned against worshipping the men of his generation. “This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead,” he wrote: “. . . laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past.
Jackson’s first campaign involved implementing the policy of Indian removal, forcibly moving native peoples east of the Mississippi River to lands to the west.
one senator from New Jersey inquiring, “Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?”
1829
On the forced march 800 miles westward and, by Jefferson’s imagining, backward in time, one in four Cherokees died, of starvation, exposure, or exhaustion, on what came to be called the Trail of Tears. By the time it was over, the U.S. government had resettled 47,000 southeastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi and acquired more than a hundred million acres of land to the east.
Writing in 1839, Harrison’s campaign biographer tried, in The People’s Presidential Candidate, to present the staggeringly wealthy Harrison as a humble farmer who had “never been rich.”
