Character Mattered

With the new round of controversy over what to do about Confederate monuments, I’ve been thinking about something Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1789:

I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

In the late nineteenth century, when many of these monuments were erected, the communities determined that honoring Confederate soldiers aligned with their values.  Their decisions should have no power over us today.

It is not erasing history to remove the monuments. There is a difference between remembering and honoring.  We have many ways to remember our history: books, museums, documentaries, and now mega-hit Broadway musicals  As a history teacher I would hate to think that we can only remember our history through erecting monuments.  Statues don’t tell much of a story after all.  Of course, we need to remember, but do we need to honor the Confederates with monuments in highly visible public places?  Robert E. Lee was by all accounts a gentleman and an inspiring leader.  That’s not why he got a monument.  He was a high ranking officer in the United States army, trained at West Point, and he became a traitor to his country.  His actions contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of United States soldiers.  Many are taught, as I was, that the main cause of the Civil War was not the protection of slavery–it was about tariffs and states’ rights.   It is interesting how this is so unclear to us today; it wasn’t to anyone in 1860. The South lost the war but they won the history.   Read any of the ordinances of secession issued by the southern states.  They were most alarmed by the attacks on the institution of slavery.  Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States, knew what the cause was about:

Our new government is founded…. its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Thank goodness that the dead have neither powers nor rights over us.

I was thinking that this might be a good time to read the Constitution.  For those who would prefer not to get lost in the tall grass of some of those interminably long sentences, the main ideas are right there in the preamble.  It is one very beautiful sentence that tells us in clear language exactly what are the goals of government.  The rest of the Constitution just fills out the details.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

No goal stands alone.  They exist in a delicate balance that can be easily upset, especially during a crisis such as our current COVID-19 emergency.  It is during a crisis, however, when we are tested on what we truly believe.  Are these words just pretty window dressing or are they the rock-steady values upon which we make our decisions?

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union

In 1787 we were already a union, otherwise we could not have come together as a people.  We were far from a perfect one.  An economic crisis, bickering among the states, and a central authority that no one paid attention to, had the nation on the brink of falling apart.  To meet the crisis, a convention was held in Philadelphia to set about establishing a new government that would, as the Declaration of Independence stated that it must, “seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  The common good—the essence of the good life—is safety and happiness, and the founders listed the five objectives that will bring that about.

establish Justice

Justice must come first.  Reaching back to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics the idea of justice is central.  These are the rights and duties we have to each other, and what the society owes to each individual.  It is impossible to have unity or live peacefully if there is no justice.  The laws must be lawful—clearly understood, known in advance, and fairly applied.  How our system of justice would be arranged was the purpose of the Constitution.  No crisis can ever allow us to set that aside.

insure domestic Tranquility

This is the job of justice.  The flip-side is civil unrest and crime.  Our representatives do not always get the law making and implementing process right, however.  We cannot acquiesce for the sake of tranquility when the lawmakers veer off track.  That, after all, was the first lesson that our revolutionary founders taught us!

provide for the common defense

No question here.  James Madison said this was the primary role of government.  The devil is in the details, more so now than ever.  Is the shared enemy the economic crisis or the virus?  Can we defeat both enemies at the same time? Where and how should the authority be constitutionally placed?  How can the common defense be promoted without threatening the other objectives?  One thing the founders agreed to was that the authority for fighting a war must be placed in the national government.  Alexander Hamilton wrote, “[The] transfer of the care of the common defense from the federal head to the individual members [would be] a project oppressive to the States [and] dangerous to all.”[1]  During national emergencies, it is particularly important to have clear-headed and articulate leadership.  In more words from Hamilton, “a feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.”[2]  The personal qualities of the president are of the utmost importance.  As Dwight Eisenhower, a man who knew a thing or two about leadership said, the qualities of a great man are “vision, integrity, courage, understanding, the power of articulation, and profundity of character.”

promote the general Welfare

The penultimate goal dovetails nicely with the Declaration’s requirement that government must promote our “safety and happiness.”  We see this term again in the taxing clause of Article I.  The answer to the question—how general is general? —ignited one of the earliest ideological debates in our country that is at the root of our two-party system.  James Madison did not believe that the phrase expanded the powers of government, Alexander Hamilton believed that it did.  As it has played out, the Hamiltonian view has generally prevailed. The great crisis moments in history have generally resulted in a tectonic shift in what will be included, along with an increase in the role of government to carry out the new vision. As with all the other goals—justice, domestic tranquility, common defense—when promoting the general welfare we need to be careful not to let it interfere with what most clearly defines us: liberty.

and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

If the preamble were to be put to music, the crescendo symbol would be here.  Also notice the important shift in the type of verb.  For the other goals, government plays a role in bringing them about: it establishes, provides, and promotes.  Not so with the blessings of liberty.  The only thing that can happen to liberty is that it can be lost.  The saying goes that “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”[3]  This is why it’s a good idea to think about those goals listed in the preamble.  They exist in a delicate balance, with liberty the most precious of all.  Liberty is always the potential victim of the misuse of power.

[1] Alexander Hamilton, “No. 29,” in The Federalist Papers: The Gideon Edition, ed. James McClellan and George W. Carey, gideon ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001),

[2]  Alexander Hamilton, “No. 70,” in The Federalist Papers: The Gideon Edition, ed. James McClellan and George W. Carey, gideon ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001).

[3] This quote is often wrongly attributed to Thomas Jefferson.  Although it seems like something he would have said, there is no evidence that he ever did.  See Anna Berkes, “Eternal Vigilance,” Spurious Quotations, last modified August 22, 2010, accessed May 9, 2020, https://www.monticello.org/site/blog-and-community/posts/eternal-vigilance.

On April 13th (Thomas Jefferson’s birthday) President Trump said the following:

“When somebody is president of the United States the authority is total.  It’s total. It’s total.”

“We’re going to write up  papers on this.”

Fortunately, a paper was already written on this.

James Madison, Federalist Paper #46: “But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm. Every government would espouse the common cause. A correspondence would be opened. Plans of resistance would be concerted. One spirit would animate and conduct the whole….  But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity?”

The Resolution passed by the House of Representatives on July 16th to condemn Trump for his recent comments began as follows:

“Whereas the Founders conceived America as a haven of refuge for people fleeing from religious and political persecution, and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison all emphasized that the Nation gained as it attracted new people in search of freedom and livelihood for their families;”

To the contrary.  Jefferson was anti-immigrant and worried over the many disadvantages resulting from immigration. “It is for the happiness of those united in society,” wrote Jefferson, “to harmonize as much as possible in matters which they must of necessity transact together.” Our form of government was different from all others in that it was based on principles of freedom.  Folks coming from countries with traditions different from ours could be a problem. “They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.” With their foreign principles they will distort our legislation.  “They will infuse into it their spirit,” Jefferson predicted, and “warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” Jefferson concluded that mass immigration would make our country “more turbulent, less happy, less strong.” [1]

Don’t distort Jefferson to fit the political moment.

[1] Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 125.

Ideas have histories; and no idea has a more complex history than liberty.  Hegel wrote that history is the history of liberty.  If true, then the history of the United States must be one of the most important chapters.  Although this nation’s history has been periodically marred by visceral attempts to assert that one ethnic, religious, or racial group was more American than another, to be an American does in fact mean that one belongs to a community that is unified by an idea: liberty to pursue the good life is an unalienable right. The United States was the first nation to be founded not upon myth, conquest, or accident—as most others have before—but upon a demand for the protection of that cardinal right.

The origins of the United States are not obscured by the vagaries of the ancient past.  We do not reach back to a Herodotus-type history, where fact and fiction are blended to both inform, entertain, and impress.  The United States was founded in the bright light of recent history.  We know who the founders were, what they wrote, who they read, and—as tenuous as it might be for one person to ever claim this about another—what they were thinking.  So in celebration of the day that congress approved the Declaration of Independence, I thought I would share Thomas Jefferson’s final thoughts on what the Declaration meant.

Weak from the accumulating maladies of old age and just two weeks before his death, eighty-three-year-old  Jefferson wrote his last letter.  It was a letter to regret an invitation.  Poor health caused him to decline a request to attend a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to be held in the city of Washington.  As Jefferson would occasionally and wonderfully do in his letters, in this polite correspondence he veered into the loftiest reflections on the nature of human existence and why the Declaration must always be remembered.

Monticello June 24. 1826

Respected Sir

The kind invitation I receive from you on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration of the 50th. anniversary of American independance; as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world, is most flattering to myself… May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government. that form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. all eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view. the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. these are grounds of hope for others. for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

“Be this as it may, in every free & deliberating society, there must from the nature of man be opposite parties, & violent dissensions & discords; and one of these for the most part must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time. perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch & debate to the people the proceedings of the other… a little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their government to it’s true principles… it is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit.”[1]

[1] “From Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 4 June 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, version of January 18, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0280. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 30, 1 January 1798 – 31 January 1799, ed. Barbara B. Oberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 387–390.]

The modern Thanksgiving script includes expressions of gratitude for our many blessings; and that is certainly very good (albeit while eating too much—the underside of a life of abundance.)  Thanksgiving has also unfortunately become a time to perpetuate some bad history.  The celebration of the first harvest that is introduced to American school children as they make their paper Pilgrim hats and Indian headdresses masks the truth.  The earliest encounter between the newcomers and the natives was theft, and the long-term policy was annihilation.  More damaging, however, is the loss of the deeper experience of self-reflection that the first Thanksgivings were meant to inspire.

Because Thanksgiving has turned into a secular national holiday with a focus on celebrating the good life, our presidents naturally want to participate.  They take part in the silliness of pardoning one of the forty-five million turkeys that are killed for Thanksgiving.  It might be best to leave unexplored what that scene reveals about the American character.  It is more interesting to look at the proclamations that are dutifully issued by the presidents on Thanksgiving Day.   The statements from Barack Obama in 2016 and Donald Trump in 2017, when compared to the earliest presidential proclamations, expose how removed Americans are today from the original spirit of this national holiday.

Before listing the many things for which Americans should be thankful, both Obama and Trump began their proclamations with the standard trope about the first feast in Plymouth.  Obama went further than Trump with the historical revisionism by claiming that what brought the Pilgrims and Wampanoag tribe together was “the power of faith, love, gratitude, and optimism.”[1]  Forget that it was starvation for the former and hope for a military alliance for the latter.  Both Obama and Trump managed to get some important American history glaringly wrong. Obama claimed that our history “teaches us that the American instinct has never been to seek isolation in opposite corners; it is to find strength in our common creed and forge unity from our great diversity.”[2]  Any student of American history knows that a spirit of isolationism dominated American foreign policy from George Washington’s “no foreign entanglements” to the Monroe Doctrine to the delayed entry into World War I and II.  His statement that Americans have always celebrated diversity glosses over America’s long history of nativism.  But I digress.

Trump’s major error had to do with the history of the Thanksgiving holiday.  He stated that after the first celebration over four-hundred years ago, for “the next two centuries, many individual colonies and states, primarily in the Northeast, carried on the tradition of fall Thanksgiving festivities.  But each state celebrated it on a different day, and sometime on an occasional basis.  It was not until 1863 that the holiday was celebrated on one day, nationwide….President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that the country would set aside one day to remember its many blessings.”[3]  Not true.  First of all, days of thanks that were frequent in Calvinist New England–with the emphasis on repenting sins, prayer, and fasting–were far from festive celebrations.  Secondly, Washington, Adams, and Madison all proclaimed national days of thanksgiving (Jefferson believed that such proclamations were an uncalled-for government intrusion into religious life.)  Most important, if we look at these earliest proclamations the emphasis was on character building through prayer and repentance, not thanking; and none of them connected Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims and the Indians.

Washington proclaimed that a public day of prayer would be held on Thursday, November 26, 1789 in order to give thanks to God for peace and prosperity.  The American people, however, needed to do more than just be thankful. Thanksgiving Day was a sincerely Christian day.  The forgiveness of sins with the promise to be better was the central experience.  Washington wrote that the American people should “beseech [God] to pardon our national and other transgressions to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed  To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue.”[4]

John Adams issued two proclamations for a national day of thanksgiving in 1798 and again in 1799.  In 1798 Adams expressed with his typically tangled and endless sentences that May 9^th should be designated “as a day of Solemn Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer” when we acknowledge before God “the manifold Sins and Transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as Individuals and as a Nation; beseeching him, at the same time, of his infinite Grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our Offences, and to incline us, by his Holy Spirit, to that sincere Repentance and Reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable Favour and Heavenly Benediction…”  In addition to praying for continued economic prosperity, Americans must pray “that the principles of Genuine Piety and Sound Morality may influence the Minds and govern the Lives of every description of our Citizens.”[5]

Due perhaps to his growing problems both foreign and domestic, Adams appeared to be in a darker mood in 1799 when he proclaimed that a day in April would be set aside for all Americans to “call to mind our numerous offences against the most High GOD, confess them before him with the sincerest penitence, implore his pardoning mercy… for our past transgressions.”  In Adams’s worldview, there was very little to be thankful for; we needed to stop being so very bad!  Americans needed God’s help to “arrest the progress of that impiety and licentiousness in principle and practice, so offensive to himself and so ruinous to mankind.”[6] 

Lincoln’s Proclamation of 1863 was the most succinct and to the point.  It was meant to direct the people’s attention to blessings that were “of so extraordinary a nature” that it would soften the heart of those who do not tend to recognize the hand of God in all things.  It was nothing short of a miracle that in 1863 Americans had anything to be thankful for at all.  Despite the fact of the nation being engaged in a civil war, the nation was expanding and prospering.  God must be thanked “for such singular deliverances and blessings,” yet we should express profound and humble repentance “for our national perverseness and disobedience.”[7]

That might be a good line for Trump to begin his 2018 Thanksgiving Proclamation.

[1] “Presidential Proclamation — Thanksgiving Day, 2016,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, last modified November 23, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/11/23/presidential-proclamation-thanksgiving-day-2016

[2] Ibid.

[3] “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims Thursday, November 23, 2017, as a National Day of Thanksgiving,” The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/president-donald-j-trump-proclaims-thursday-november-23-2017-national-day-thanksgiving/

[4] “Thanksgiving Proclamation, 3 October 1789,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-04-02-0091. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 4, 8 September 1789 – 15 January 1790, ed. Dorothy Twohig. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 131–132.]

[5] “Proclamation Proclaiming a Fast-Day, 23 March 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-2386.

[6] “Fast Day Proclamation, 6 March 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3372.

[7] “Proclamation of Thanksgiving,” Abraham Lincoln Online, National Archives, accessed November 17, 2018, http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/thanks.htm

The American way of life is currently threatened from two sources: immigration and anti-government speech (most particularly anti-president speech).  The two are not necessarily related, but they both must be limited to save our nation.  The first problem is freedom of speech and the press. In order to promote the general welfare sometimes the blessings of liberty must be limited.  There is great danger in the false and malicious speech aimed at the president and the party that is currently in control of Congress.  The second problem is that enemies are infiltrating American society.  We must make it more difficult for aliens to obtain citizenship.  It should also be easier to deport new immigrants who are deemed dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, (New immigrants also tend to vote for the other party.)  So believed John Adams when in July of 1798 he signed in to law the Alien and Sedition Acts.

According to Adams our nation was at a dangerous precipice, where “Disorder, indifference, indiscipline, and disobedience” were defended as rights.  The “calumnies and contempts” and the “spirit of falsehood and malignity” that were directed against his government were a threat to the very “moral character of the nation.”[1]  It was therefore necessary to pass this law that would allow the president to deport “all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” In addition, this law determined that speech that was intended to defame “either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them…into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them…the hatred of the good people of the United States,” was punishable with fines and imprisonment.

This was the time in American history when our nation was first negotiating the relationships between liberty and security, and between party allegiance and patriotism. Adams made the mistake of conflating his political opponents with those who would truly wish to undermine or destroy our form of government, in other words, real and imagined threats.

Aristotle identified three forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy.  The distinguishing feature was whether power was held by one, or by a few, or by the many.  Democracy, unlike in the other two, is government by discussion.  The core problem that Adams faced, and mishandled to the ultimate harm of his party, was how to control the vitriol, exaggerations, and lies that will always be part of the discussion.

[1] John Adams, “‘To the Citizens Committee of Boston and Vicinity,'” in John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784-1826, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York, N.Y.: Library of America, 2011), 350.

In 1800 president John Adams ran for a second term against Thomas Jefferson.  Few disputed that Jefferson was the intended winner, but the quirks of the electoral college system left him without the necessary majority[1].  Only after thirty-six exhausting rounds of balloting in the House of Representatives (and largely thanks to the agile political skills of Alexander Hamilton) did Jefferson become our third president.  This was the first presidential election since the formation of political parties and the vicious partisan attacks had been unrestrained.  Jefferson knew when he decided to run for the presidency that he would be the subject of a constant barrage of fake news, or as he phrased it, “absolute falsehoods without a circumstance of truth to rest on”[2]  Among other unhinged attacks from the Federalists, Jefferson was said to be an atheist who would burn all the Bibles after his election.  Not to be outdone, the Jeffersonian Republicans claimed that Adams was mentally unbalanced, a narcissist[3], and was plotting to establish a hereditary monarchy.  The campaign had been bitter enough, but in the weeks that it took for Jefferson to secure a majority in the House, the rhetoric became more cataclysmic.  There was wild talk of civil war and mobs marching on Washington.  Jefferson did not indicate that he would try to restrain the violence that might erupt if the election did not go his way.  Fortunately,  Jefferson was determined the winner and the American people witnessed the historically rare phenomenon of a peaceful transfer of power between two political parties.  The bitterness and acrimony, however, had not subsided.  Adams demonstrated his disgust by refusing to attend Jefferson’s inauguration.

As one of the greatest wordsmiths of the founding generation, Jefferson knew the power of language.  Words do in fact matter.  In his first opportunity to address the American people as president he used his words to lift Americans above the political divisions that party labels emphasized and focus on the values that united the nation.  “Every difference of opinion,” spoke Jefferson, “is not a difference of principle.”  Americans must focus on the elevating principles and not the antagonizing differences.  There was a heavy dose of unabashed American exceptionalism—what is referred to today as America first nationalism—but  the emphasis was on what made America great in the first place: the virtuous character of the American people that was nourished by liberty.  Jefferson knew how to craft sentences that could focus on the unifying truths of our nation.  Might be helpful to mull them over now:

 “Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions…. Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter — with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

[1] Fixed by the 12^th Amendment

[2] “From Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 23 September 1800,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-32-02-0102. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 32, 1 June 1800 – 16 February 1801, ed. Barbara B. Oberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 166–169.]

[3] They would not have used the word “narcissist” but that’s what they meant when they wrote about his dangerously vain personality.