Archives for August 2020

Alan Taylor: Thomas Jefferson’s Education. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019.

 

“This book examines Jefferson’s efforts to reform Virginia through education,” efforts that proved an education in themselves—preeminently an education in regime politics. Jefferson’s favored regime—a democratic republic for what he considered his country, Virginia, and for the United States, the American Union as a whole—faced two main threats: plantation slavery, which “subsidized education for masters but complicated attempts to school common whites” and “blocked literacy for black Virginians” almost entirely; a newly-strengthened federal government, which Jefferson regarded as a nucleus of monarchy so long as neither he nor his ally Madison were in the White House. As Jefferson wrote to his old rival, John Adams, he detested any conventional aristocracy, preferring a way of life whereby the “natural aristoi of virtue and talent” set the tone and governed the people who elected them. “Raked from the rubbish annually,” the natural aristoi should be provided with an education to fit them for political rule by the consent of said rubbish. Such men would be fitted to defend Virginia from encroachments by the federal power, vindicating self-government of Virginians in their state, their country, and in the smaller “ward republics” or local governing units wherein those men would gain the necessary practical experience to guide Virginians through the rough political waters Jefferson rightly foresaw.

In this, Jefferson faced a problem that proved insuperable in his lifetime. “The profits of slavery also underwrote the planter hedonism that so troubled Jefferson as antithetical to self-discipline and study.” Hedonists can’t rule themselves, much less their ward, their state, their nation. He hoped that the next generation of Virginians, given the proper course of college study, would follow his own example in “saving” themselves, through education, from what he called “the society of horse racers, card, players, [and] foxhunters.” Looking back from the vantage of old age, he professed, “I am astonished I did not turn off with some of them, & become as worthless to society as they were.” In his reform attempts, Jefferson did not, at least at first, reflect upon his own experience with the scientific rigor he admired, as a devotee of the Enlightenment. Jefferson and his classmates had equal educational opportunities, but they chose radically different ways of life. That being so, the mere provision of education could not have been the cause of Jefferson’s own way of life, a scientist would say. Why, then, did he not “turn off” with the others? Nearly 100 years later, a philosopher (thinking of himself) asserted that the exception to the rule can never be the rule. In essaying to make his own ‘exceptionalism’ the rule, the way of life, the regime of the plantation class, Jefferson overestimated the hearts and minds of the young scions, the conventional quasi-aristocrats who were not, and never could become, natural aristoi of either virtue or talent.

Jefferson enrolled in Virginia’s best college, William and Mary, in 1760. The six professors were Anglican clergymen imported from England, and the school was properly Anglican. “But the regimentation had scant impact on young Virginians used to having their way”; “most came for only a year or two to get a smattering of education, so almost all left without a degree rather than meet the high standards enforced by the Masters.” The Board of Visitors—what now would be called a board of trustees—sided mostly with the students against the faculty. As plantation owners who expected their sons to inherit the family business, the Visitors “wanted a practical education” for the students—surveying, agronomy—not the liberal education centering on “philosophy and ancient languages” the faculty would impart. Visitors and faculty charged one another with drunkenness and other vices; each blamed the other for student indiscretions. For his part, Jefferson found a mentor in the lone Deist on the faculty, professor of natural philosophy and mathematics William Small. The exception to the rule found an exception to the rule, who helped him to become even more exceptional.

As governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, Jefferson “tried to modernize and republicanize the College of William & Mary,” so that it might endow “the future guardians of the rights and liberties” of Virginia “with science and virtue.” Preoccupied by the war, the state legislature “balked at altering the charter and investing in the College.” The Board of Visitors proved more persuadable, eliminating the faculty positions in divinity and replacing them with “professorships in anatomy and medicine, modern languages, and law.” But with its funds from Britain cut off, the College nearly folded, and the Anglican Church, disestablished after the revolution, could offer no help. The rising evangelical sects (Presbyterians in particular) saw to it that the Church wouldn’t get re-established, refusing to support any state subsidies for churches generally, much less for Anglicans. With the passage of the Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786 and a return to Church establishment and church subsidies both foreclosed, higher education in Virginia was disrupted for a generation. Jefferson’s firm defense of church-state separation hobbled his plans for educational reform while also clearing the way for more radical reforms—or so it seemed.

The College of William & Mary desperately needed reform. Located in Williamsburg, the colonial capital, it suffered along with the rest of the city from the ravages of war, followed by economic decline when Virginians moved their capital to Richmond. The students dueled, caroused, and courted the daughters of the dozen remaining wealthy families. The quasi-aristocratic “honor culture” of the Southern gentry distinguished them from the detested Yankees—critics of slavery, mere tradesmen even if rich. “Mastering genteel manners carried more weight than learning from books,” as “parents worried that overly studious sons became sickly and asocial—too much like their professors,” a prospect nearly too horrible to contemplate. “Young gentlemen attended college to hone social skills and cultivate social networks.” This had become more important than ever, precisely because Virginia civil society had become a bit more democratic under the republican regime: mere birth was no longer assured prominence, but neither did mere learning. One student spoke for his generation in contending that “the greatest talents and learning can hardly succeed in this Republican Country”; in competing with others for fame, one needed a certain panache, the ability to stand out from the crowd.

By the early 1800s, as U. S. President Jefferson completed his final term in office, the college “reached a new low,” as students angry with the Bishop and the faculty for attempting “to suppress drunken parties and balls” vandalized the buildings and threatened the prelate, who called in the city militia for protection. Enrollment declined, then “stagnated at about fifty students,” in contrast to the enrollments of the principal Ivy League colleges, “each of which attracted at least 150 students.” Worse, the college suffered from a severe problem of what education professionals today call ‘student retention’: “From 1800 through 1805, the college granted degrees to only 3 students, during a period when more than 150 attended courses.” Bored, riotous Virginia students—along with their counterparts in colleges throughout the South—stayed in school long enough to make some useful social ‘contacts,’ and that was all. In his seminal Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke had deplored schools for boys and young men, considering them places where a student will follow the examples of his peers not his teachers. Locke was right, at least when it came to the sons of the gentry classes. One student in South Carolina reported, “The student herds with the boys alone,” making “rapid advances in smoking, chewing, playing billiards, concocting sherry cobblers, gin slings, and mint juleps.” while developing an ethos of what another graduate called “a petulant arrogance, or supine, listless indifference”; “these premature men remain children for the rest of their lives,” “striplings” who “set up for legislators and statesmen.”

Seeing this, Jefferson sought to “rescue Virginia from the defiant generation spawned by honor culture, the unanticipated fruit of his revolution.” He had his own, similar, struggles in his own household. The husband of his oldest granddaughter “turned out a great sot, always frolicking and Carousing at the Taverns in the Neighbourhood” before returning home to beat his wife, as a family friend rather astringently observed. Jefferson himself knew that these beatings had caused the young woman to lose “eight of twelve pregnancies before or shortly after birth.” Grandfather Thomas, long a widower, himself was rumored to have a slave mistress. Although he “had hoped that the passage of time would favor [slave] emancipation as young liberals grew up to replace old conservatives among Virginia’s leaders,” and although “antislavery sentiment peaked during the revolution,” backsliding quickly commenced. At first, manumission increased from one percent of the slave population in 1782 to seven percent by 1800. Consequent fears of revolt among those still enslaved bridled the practice, as did an economic shift. Slaves harvested tobacco in Virginia, a crop that exhausts the soil; simultaneously, cotton farming “boomed in the Deep South, increasing the demand there for enslaved people bought from Virginia.” From 1790 to 1810, Marylanders and Virginians (who once owned more slaves than anyone in the United States) sold some 100,000 of their ‘property’ to South Carolina, Georgia, and other points in the rising Cotton Kingdom.

Against these practices, Jefferson successfully obtained a federal ban on slave importation, as stipulated in the United States Constitution. He also proposed plans for state purchase of slaves and their removal either to Africa or to Haiti. But the prohibition of the international slave trade only made the domestic slave trade more lucrative, and the colonization schemes never got off the ground. More, Jefferson shared with his fellow Virginians resistance to educating freedmen and slaves, understanding that “education could empower and liberate enslaved people to the detriment of their masters,” slaves being considered “too ignorant for freedom” but “too dangerous” to educate. Such policies, taken together, only reinforced the rule of plantation oligarchs and the way of life that made their sons ineducable and therefore un-republican. Virginians had understood what Montesquieu teaches: to survive, despotism must perpetuate ignorance in its subjects.

Jefferson did attempt to advance republicanism by educating whites. As governor, he proposed 126 bills that, taken together, would have “eradicated” any “ancient or future aristocracy,” laying “a foundation… for a government truly republican.” In education, this meant colleges that would educate future elected representatives of the people, young men from the plantation class “supplemented by a few charity students”; intermediary schools or academies would be animated by that republican spirit; next, local schools under the direction of the newly-republican upper class would teach the common man, in Jefferson’s words, “to read, to judge & to vote understandingly on what is passing”; finally, on the political side of things, his ‘ward republics’ would “bypass and weaken the county governments dominated by local oligarchies,” “train[ing] common men in participatory democracy to defend their interests.” Nearly twenty years later, “legislators passed a watered-down version of Jefferson’s system.” Many regions of Virginia simply lacked the population density needed to support local public schools and the slave system enabled the planters to defend their power, despite what one transplanted Vermonter called their “boasted liberty and Equality.” 

Jefferson’s inveterate secularism didn’t help his cause. Evangelical in zeal if not religion, he delighted in the educational theories of William Godwin, that champion of “the radical Enlightenment” who devoutly excluded religious instruction from his pedagogy. Transplanted to Virginia by young academy-level teachers, Godwin’s methods led, in the words of the future U. S. Army general Winfield Scott, to “too much… attempted within a limited time by republican short cuts to knowledge.” And by associating his brand of republicanism with secularism, rather in the manner of the French Enlighteners he admired, Jefferson alienated the very evangelical Christians who had opposed the gentry-Anglican education Jefferson himself intended to get rid of.

Also, Jefferson’s ‘top-down’ reforms, beginning with the colleges and percolating down through the academies and down to the grammar schools, ensured that few middle-class or poor students could get into the colleges. As one of his critics saw, the plantation gentry “will make colleges and endow them for the education of their own children,” children unprepared for serious learning both intellectually and morally. One faculty member at William & Mary found students who were not only “shameful Latinists” but “incapable of writing a sentence in English correctly.” 

Jefferson determined to begin anew—seeking, in his later years, to persuade the Virginia legislature to found a new university. The proposal advanced because “a dread of northern influence had become the key way to alarm Virginia’s legislators into funding a university”; as one stout Virginian put it, the further Virginia fell behind the Yankees in education, the more likely they would become “hewers of wood & drawers of water to pamper an insolent & ignorant northern aristocracy,” an aristocracy that moreover rested not on slaves but factory workers. The planters’ unease only deepened during the controversy over the extension of slavery into Missouri, ending in the 1820 Compromise. But not really ending: Jefferson himself expected that civil war would “burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later.” Not one to let a crisis go to waste, he redoubled his rhetoric in favor of a new university. Without one, he warned, Virginians will fall “into the ranks of our own negroes.” As Taylor writes, “By founding a University of Virginia, legislators sought to repatriate the money and minds of their students in the North.” 

They succeeded all too well, in Jefferson’s view. Exactly the same problems with Christian evangelicals and Southern gentry youth that hobbled pedagogy at William & Mary caused his project to stumble out of the gate. With respect to religion, “Jefferson expected Unitarianism ultimately to triumph, uniting at least all men in one true faith,” as men would quickly adopt even if, as Jefferson forecast, “female fanaticism might hold out a while longer.” Disbelieving the Pauline doctrine of original sin, Jefferson accepted Godwin’s counter-claims, writing that the “vicious and perverse” qualities of human nature could be turned “into qualities of virtue and social worth” if only we get educational and political institutions right. Indeed, with Godwin, he judged human nature to be perfectible “to a term which no one can fix and foresee.” He installed a professor of ethics instead of a professor of divinity, a library instead of a chapel. But in this he found a formidable critic in John Holt Rice, a serious Presbyterian minister in Richmond who detested Deism and Unitarianism, promoted Sunday schools, and advocated education for slaves. Rice wisely sought not to block the University’s formation but to turn it to Christian purposes. When Jefferson proposed English émigré Deist Thomas Cooper as the University’s first professor, Rice pounced, writing widely-read “scathing review” of Cooper’s published opinions on religion. On Jefferson’s advice, Cooper withdrew his name from consideration. Nonetheless, when it opened “the University held no prayers, offered no Sunday services, and lacked any courses on theology.” It central building the Rotunda, was “modeled on a pagan temple and reflect[ed] Enlightenment rationalism.” 

As for the students, “their way of life bred a great contradiction: young men without the self-discipline needed to defend the South” against “supposed northern cultural and political aggression.” Jefferson “feared student disorder as the greatest threat to the University,” citing the students “spirit of insubordination and self-will which seizes our youth so early in life as to defeat their education.” “Premature ideas of independence,” he continued, “too little repressed by parents, beget a spirit of insubordination, which is the great obstacle to science with us, and a principal cause of its decay since the revolution.” This decidedly anti-republican aspect of the Virginia regime proved too strong to be overborne by Jefferson’s innovative architectural design—what he called an “architectural village” with students and professors living in parallel rows in a scholarly and idealized version of his envisioned ward republics. Far from promoting “peace & quiet” on campus, as he had hoped, with professors doubling as kindly police officers in the neighborhood, student-teacher propinquity threatened the teachers. “The students were young southern gentlemen of the sort that made trouble at every college.” Ill-prepared academically—recall that Jefferson founded the University first, with grammar schools and academies to follow—and bred to rebelliousness morally, students beat up one hapless prof with sticks, bottles, and a brick. Not only did this thin out the ranks of the professors, it also drove out the more respectable students, the father of whom lamented, “the young men have acted in a manner unworthy of savages” in the putative citadel of Virginia civilization. Christian critics piled on, too, “interpret[ing] the troubles as the inevitable fruits of a godless and anarchic university,” indeed “a School in infidelity, a nursery of bad principles, designed in its origin to crush the Institutions of Religion in Virginia,” as one Presbyterian sternly, and not altogether inaccurately, put it.

Jefferson and the Board of Visitors intervened, the latter enacting a stricter set of rules, Jefferson launching a concurrent ‘charm offensive,’ with invitations to dine at nearby Monticello with the great man himself. But this was late in 1825, and Jefferson would die on Independence Day of the following year. University faculty and trustees greeted the news with decidedly mixed feelings, as they had by then given up on the weak administration “mandated by Jefferson,” ever suspicious of executive power, “who had dispensed with the position of president that prevailed at every other university.” The troubles continued, thanks to the ethos of Southern planters: “As with the old William & Mary, the new University attracted a volatile set of students,” with only 127 of the 3,247 attendees graduating in the years 1825 and 1842. Taylor holds up the ill-fated genius Edgar Allan Poe, who numbered among those students, as an extreme but illustrative example of that generation: “He admired Jefferson’s learning but despised as naïve his faith in democracy and Unitarianism,” eventually dying in an alcohol delirium at a Baltimore hospital. Things did improve somewhat after Jefferson died, as the Visitors enacted what amounted to sumptuary laws and tried to Christianized the school to some degree. They even hired William Holmes McGuffey, publisher of the McGuffey Readers, as professor of moral philosophy. 

But these reforms caused a student backlash. Some of the rowdies left, but the ones who remained sparked riots in the 1830s “far larger and more violent than the fabled outbursts of 1825.” In 1840, law professor John A. G. Davis was gunned down by a rioting student, who fled to the more congenial atmosphere of Texas. This seems to have sobered the students somewhat; they were persuaded to adopt an honor code, a device that engages the pride of spirited young men while putting it in the service of morality, for a change. More important, Southern gentry youth themselves were changing, as evangelical Christianity made inroads among the planters. “Christian temperance and self-discipline emerged among the students,” some thirty years after the founder’s death. Enrollments increased, “reach[ing] the numbers predicted by Jefferson,” but only “by embracing the religiosity that he had distrusted.” Even an Episcopalian minister exulted that Jefferson’s “plans are all defeated.” “The religion of Jesus triumphs over all his opposition” and “all his greatness has perished and is forgotten because he was an infidel.” Jeffersonian states’-rights sentiments endured and hardened, however. With slavery increasingly defended on Biblical grounds while Jefferson’s natural-rights doctrine gave way to ‘race science,’ the civil war Jefferson predicted broke out at last, now with a gentry class that did indeed have the discipline to fight the detested Yankees, and nearly to beat them.

Thomas Jefferson’s serious if flawed attempt to change the regime of Virginia, to conform its way of life to republican forms of government, exemplifies the difficulties attendant to any revolution, a lesson as old as Plato’s Republic, or, indeed, the Bible. Israelites were not the only stiff-necked people in the world. Most people are, and if the spirited love of ruling, along with the equally spirited resistance to being ruled, cannot be moderated by redirecting the human sense of honor toward good ends, the founding will fail.

 

 

 

This essay was originally published by Constituting America in July 2020.

 

To secure the unalienable natural rights of the American people, the American Founders designed a republican regime. Republics had existed long before: ancient Rome, modern Switzerland and Venice. Great Britain itself could be described as a republic, with a strong legislature counterbalancing a strong monarchy—even if the rule of that legislature and that monarchy over the overseas colonies of the British Empire could hardly be considered republican. But the republicanism instituted after the War of Independence, especially as framed at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, featured a combination of elements never seen before, and seldom thereafter.

The American definition of republicanism was itself unique. ‘Republic’ or res publica means simply, ‘public thing’—a decidedly vague notion that might apply to any regime other than a monarchy. In the tenth Federalist, James Madison defined republicanism as representative government, that is, by a specific way of constructing the country’s ruling institutions. The Founders gave republicanism a recognizable form beyond ‘no-monarchic.’ From the design of the Virginia House of Burgesses to the Articles of Confederation and finally to the Constitution itself, representation provided Americans with real exercise of self-rule, while at the same time avoiding some of the turbulence and folly of pure democracies, which had so disgraced themselves in ancient Greece that popular sovereignty itself had been dismissed by most political thinkers ever since. Later on, Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address shows how republics must defend the rule of law against mob violence; even the naming of Lincoln’s party as the Republican Party was intended to contrast it with the rule of slaveholding plantation oligarchs in the South.

The American republic had six additional characteristics. America was a natural-rights republic, limiting the legitimate exercise of popular rule to actions respecting the unalienable rights of its citizens; it was a democratic republic, with no formal class of titled lords and ladies or hereditary monarchs; it was an extended republic, big enough to defend itself against the formidable empires that threatened it; it was a commercial republic, encouraging prosperity and innovation; it was a federal republic, leaving substantial political powers in the hands of state and local representatives; and it was a compound republic, dividing the powers of the national government into three branches, each with the means of defending itself against encroachments by the others.

When considering the American course of events recorded in our histories, students of our republic might consider each event as a reflection of these features of that regime as designed by the Founders, or, in some cases, as a deviation from that regime. To do so is to see how profound and pervasive American republicanism has been, how it has shaped Americans’ lives for more than two centuries, how it continues to do so today. 

A natural-rights republic. The charter of the first English colony, Jamestown, was written in part by the great English authority on the common law, Sir Edward Coke. English common law was an amalgam of natural law and English custom. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded shortly thereafter, was an attempt to establish the natural right of religious liberty. And, of course, the Declaration of Independence rests squarely on the foundation of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God as the foundation of unalienable natural rights, several of which were given formal status in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. As Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831, the Dred Scott case in 1857, the Civil Rights amendments of the 1860s, and the attempt at replacing plantation oligarchy with republican regimes in the states after the Civil War all show, natural rights have been the pivot of struggles over the character of America. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues in the post-Second-World War civil rights movement invoked the Declaration and natural rights to argue for civic equality, a century after the Civil War. As a natural-rights republic, America rejects in principle race, class, and gender as bars to the protection of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In practice, Americans have often failed to live up to their principles—as human beings are wont to do—but the principles remain as their standard of right conduct.

A democratic republic. The Constitution itself begins with the phrase, “We the People,” and the reason constitutional law governs all statutory laws is that the sovereign people ratified that Constitution, whereas federal statutory laws are enacted only by their elected representatives. George Washington was elected as America’s first president, but he astonished the world by stepping down eight years later; he had no ambition to become another George III, or a Napoleon. The Democratic Party, which began to be formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison when they went into opposition against the Adams administration, named itself for this feature of the American regime. The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for popular election of senators, the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing voting rights for women, and the major civil rights laws of the 1960s all express the democratic theme in American public life. This theme is so powerful that our most intelligent of foreign observers, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote a rather lengthy book on the subject.

An extended republic.  Unlike the ancient democracies, which could only rule small territories, American republicanism gave citizens the chance of ruling themselves in a territory large enough to defend itself against the powerful states and empires that had arisen in modern times. All of this was contingent, however, on Jefferson’s idea that what his ally James Madison called our extended republic would be an “empire of liberty,” by which he meant that new territories would be eligible to join the Union on an equal footing with the original thirteen states. Further, every state was to have a republican regime, as stipulated in the Constitution’s Article IV, section iv. The extension of this republic, ‘from sea to shining sea,’ as the song lyric goes, began with the Northwest Ordinance and continued with Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Mexican War of 1848, the purchase of Alaska and the acquisition of Hawaii. The construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, beginning in the 1860s, the Eisenhower Administration’s Interstate Highway Act of 1956 consolidated the extended republic. The construction of the Panama Canal, the two world wars, and the Cold War all followed from the need to defend that republic from foreign regime enemies and to keep the sea lanes open for American commerce.

A commercial republic.  Although it has proven eminently capable of defending itself militarily, American was not intended to be a military republic, like ancient Rome and the First Republic of France. The Constitution prohibits interstate tariffs, making the United States a vast free-trade zone—something Europe would not achieve for another two centuries. Alexander Hamilton’s brilliant plan to retire the national debt after the Revolutionary War and the founding of the New York Stock Exchange in 1792 ensured the financial stability of the commercial republic in its early years. Above all, commerce sparks innovation: Eli Morse’s telegraph; Alexander Bell’s telephone; Thomas Edison’s phonograph and light bulb; the Wright Brothers’ flying machine; Philo Farnsworth’s television. And we’ve seen how commerce in a free market can go wrong if the legislation and federal policies governing it are misconceived, as they often were before, during, and sometimes after the Great Depression.

A federal republic. A republic might be ‘unitary’—ruled by a single, centralized government. The American Founders saw that this would lead to an overbearing national government, one that would eventually undermine self-government itself. Accordingly, they gave the federal government enumerated powers, leaving the remaining governmental powers “to the States, or the People.” The Civil War was fought over this issue as well as slavery, question of whether the American Union could defend itself against its internal enemies. The substantial centralization of federal government power seen in the New Deal of the 1930s, the Great Society legislation of the 1960s, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010 have renewed the question of how far such power is entitled to reach.

A compound republic.  A simple republic would elect one branch of government to exercise all three powers: legislative, executive, and judicial. This was the way the Articles of Confederation worked. The Constitution ended that, providing instead for the separation and balance of those three powers. The compound character of the American republic has been eroded by such notions as ‘executive leadership’ —a principle first enunciated by Woodrow Wilson but firmly established by Franklin Roosevelt and practiced by all of his successors—and ‘broad construction’ of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. The most dramatic struggle between the several branches of government in recent decades was the Watergate controversy, wherein Congress attempted to set limits on presidential claims of ‘executive privilege.’ Recent controversies over the use of ‘executive orders’ have reminded Americans of all political stripes that government by decree can gore anyone’s prize ox.

The classical political philosophers classified the forms of political rule, giving names to the several ‘regimes’ they saw around them. They emphasized the importance of regimes because regimes, they knew, designate who rules us, the institutions by which the rulers rule, the purposes of that rule, and finally the way of life of citizens or subjects. In choosing a republican regime on a democratic foundation, governing a large territory for commercial purpose with a carefully calibrated set of governmental powers, all intended to secure the natural rights of citizens according to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the Founders wet the course of human events on a new and better path. Each generation of Americans has needed to understand the American way of life and to defend it.

 

 

The following essay was published by Real Clear Politics in the “1776” series, in February 2020.

 

After winning the independence they had declared in 1776, Americans had to prove that they could sustain self-government in peace. They’d governed themselves already, as colonists, but now the British government no longer protected them from the other European powers, and indeed remained a potential enemy of the new country. It’s easy for us today to wonder why American statesmen from Washington to Lincoln seemed obsessed with building and sustaining “the Union,” or why President Jefferson so readily bent his constitutional scruples to purchase Louisiana from Napoleon to extend it. But to Americans then, looking at maps of North America, seeing their republic surrounded by hostile empires and nations whose rulers viewed republicanism, and often Americans themselves, with fear and contempt, maintaining the Union meant survival—survival not only of their way of life but of their very lives.

How to strengthen that Union, the new American state—not a simple, centralized state as seen in Europe throughout the modern period, but a confederation—without losing the new American regime, one of the few existing democratic republics? The first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation, seemed incapable of holding the Union together. Americans tried again, framing the much-amended, much-abused, but still existing United States Constitution, which took effect in 1789.

To understand American self-government under that Constitution, one can do worse than to begin with its First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” These civil rights, which parallel the unalienable, natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, stand at the center of republicanism considered as an activity of self-government. They limit the power of Congress, the branch of the federal government charged with legislating. They prevent Congress from legislating republicanism out of existence. 

First, religion. The Founders understood that religious institutions could exercise immense authority over human souls. If such institutions are fused with such engines of rule as executive power, including police and military forces, legislative power including taxation, and judicial power including imprisonment and capital punishment, rulers will more readily demand unquestioned obedience from subjects. They will have no reason to respect citizens—only subjects. A few decades later, the monarchies of Europe banded together in what they called the Holy Alliance against republican regimes. While they were reacting primarily to the excesses of the French Revolution, they were no friends of the United States or of Great Britain, which by then was widening its electorate, becoming more nearly a republic in the American sense.

“No law” means no law. There shall be no establishment of religion in America—meaning, no church or other institution, membership in which entitles the congregant to fuller political rights and powers than other citizens or empowers an ‘established’ church to compel other sects to conform to its rules and practices. Further, Congress can enact no laws prohibiting religious exercise; citizens can freely organize churches and other religious communities as fully fledged civic associations, with no interference from federal lawmakers.

President Washington underscored Americans’ religious freedom by writing to every major religious denomination in the country during his first term in office, affirming American religious liberty even before the First Amendment solemnized it. Probably the three most controversial religious groups at that time were Quakers, who declined to participate in wars, even wars defending the country; Catholics, often regarded as suspect adherents to a foreign power, and as proto-monarchists as well; and Jews, targets of age-old prejudices.

Washington assured the Hebrew Congregation which met at the Tauro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island that Jews would not be merely tolerated in America, but that the new republic recognized their natural and civil rights to worship God as their consciences dictated. It was evidently the first time any Christian head of state (Washington was an Episcopalian had so recognized Jewish practice. Commending Roman Catholics for “the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of [the] Revolution, and the establishment of [the] Government,” he promised that “all who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government.” And to the Annual Meeting of Quakers in 1789, he observed that “the liberty enjoyed by the people of these states of worshipping Almighty God agreeably to their consciences, is not only the choicest of their blessings but also of their rights.” Quakers were second to no Americans as “exemplary and useful citizens.”

Self-government isn’t doing what you want to do; it is doing what you want to do in conformity with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, discernible by reason and by your conscience as they are enforced by free exercise of religious practices.

Washington’s letters display two crucial features of American religious freedom. First, it is preeminently a protection of the exercise of religion, not a restriction of its exercise. In his Farewell Address, he would call “religion and morality” “indispensable supports” of those “dispositions which lead to political prosperity.” Self-government isn’t doing what you want to do; it is doing what you want to do in conformity with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, discernible by reason and by your conscience as they are reinforced by free exercise of religious practices. At the same time, such freedom isn’t unlimited. Some religious practices might be accommodated but also criticized—Washington politely chided Quakers for refusing to join in military self-defense—or even banned, if they contradict civil laws founded upon natural right, such as religiously inspired rituals involving killing or torture. (You may freely worship the gods of the Aztecs, so long as you refrain from sacrificing virgins to the Sun God.) Congress may make no law prohibiting religious exercise, but that doesn’t prevent Americans from enforcing state laws against (for example) violations of the right to life, typically subject to state and local statutory prohibition. American federalism leaves many such crucial governmental functions to the states, functions that form part of the American enterprise of self-government.

Freedom of speech and of the press must not be prohibited—they cannot even be abridged by Congress. here, we must know what the founding generation meant by such a formula: freedom of political speech and publishing. Slander, libel, and obscenity were universally banned by state and local law, and could potentially be banned by federal law, too. Republican government requires discussion and deliberation by the sovereign people, How else could citizens make their sovereignty effective? This is why the Preamble to the Constitution begins with “We, the People of the United States.”

To rule by popular opinion requires the protection of those who speak and write on political topics. We cannot shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater because that isn’t a political act but a dangerous violation of civil society and of natural right. Equally, rule by popular opinion doesn’t mean protection of all means of expressing those opinions—for example, the aforementioned slander, libel, and obscenity, to say nothing of conspiring to commit commercial fraud or treason. And even these unsavory tactics are harder to punish if committed in political debate against a public official or candidate or office. Speech and writing directed against private citizens in civil society have always been more strictly ruled than political speech and writing, largely as a means of keeping civil society civil. The contemporary claim, popularized in the late 1960s, that ‘everything is political’ is, among other things, an attempt to bring such tactics under constitutional protection, with results much-deplored in public discourse today.

Similarly, the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances cannot be abridged by Congress because it, too, numbers among the means of popular sovereignty. Here again, popular sovereignty means the rule of the people in accordance with reason and conscience. We may assemble peaceably, not riotously; we may attend public meetings, but not disrupt them; we may petition our elected representatives but not interfere with their governmental duties.

All of this means that the freedoms protected by the First Amendment comport with every aspect of the American Founding, an attempt to design governments that secure natural rights for American citizens. In so doing, the Founders required of themselves, and of all citizens, self-government. Even the most prominent of the ‘permissive’ educators of fifty years ago, A. S. Neill, titled his book Liberty, Not License. By self-government, the Founders meant the rule of reason—”rational liberty,” as Publius terms it in Federalist #53. Such liberty begins with the individual, who learns to discipline his passions in childhood and youth within a family and in church and school. It radiates out into civil society—into local, state, and federal government, the latter charged with the responsibility of guarding American self-government from enemies foreign and domestic, by means of the Union whose structure the Constitution articulated.

Indeed, as Publius argues in Federalist #84, “the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, A BILL OF RIGHTS.” By this he means that even without an enumeration of such rights as religion and political freedoms, the Constitution declares and specifies “the political privileges of the citizens in the structure and administration of the government.” That is, it is one thing to list our rights but quite another effectually to protect them. I can make myself the most elaborate ‘to do’ list of worthy actions, but if I lack the means of acting in accordance with it, I’m just doodling. The Constitution supplies the architectural drawing of the American regime of self-government. Like all structures designed for human life, it encourages those who dwell in it to walk in some ways and not in others. Any political regime guides citizens toward a way of life. The founders of our regime intended the American way of life to be one of freedom rightly understood—as ready compliance with, and defense of, the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, laws vindicated by the Declaration of Independence and, nearly a century later, by the revolutionary (that is, regime-changing) Civil War fought on behalf of those principles and the people who adhered to them. It remains for American citizens to live in the structure the Founders designed by respecting its features, a respect that can only be maintained by what one Founder called “a moral and religious people”—which is to say, a people who perpetuate the American effort at self-government in their private, civil, and political lives.