All Episodes
Previous Next
July 5, 2025 04:42-06:00 - CSPAN
01:17:58
Framing the Declaration of Independence
Participants
Main
f
french hill
rep/r 14:52
|

Speaker Time Text
unidentified
In History TV on C-SPAN 2, a Revolutionary War reenactment at George Washington's Mount Vernon with a speech by General Washington.
I am not a Virginian, but an American.
Watch C-SPAN's America 250 coverage beginning this week on the C-SPAN networks and the C-SPAN Now app, our free mobile video app.
Also, scan the code or go online to c-SPAN.org/slash America250 for programming and scheduling information.
America 250, exploring the American story, only on the C-SPAN networks.
Okay, to introduce our third panel, please welcome Alex Bovolsky.
Alex.
Thank you.
Hello.
My name is Alex Povolsky.
I am a 2019 Coolidge Senator and a student at Yale College.
We will now move to session three.
The title of the session is The Framing of the Declaration and the Roads Not Taken.
The moderator of the session is Roger Ream.
Mr. Ream currently serves as President and CEO of the Fund for American Studies, TFAS.
He also serves on the boards of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Bradley Impact Fund.
Mr. Ream was awarded the 2021 Bradley Prize.
please welcome mr ream and our panelists to the stage thank you very much alex And thank you all for your attendance in this session on a very important topic of the restraint the founders exercised while engaging in rebellion seeking independence.
I applaud Amity, Matt, and their colleagues at how they've choreographed these sessions today and framed them so they each build on each other.
As Alex mentioned, this panel has the intriguing title, The Framing of the Declaration and the Roads Not Taken.
And we may touch on a little bit as early panels have on the road taken as well.
It was a road that led to just this what's called the great enrichment, the tremendous human flourishing in this country as our population grew from about 2.5 million at the time of the founding to over 340 million people today to become the beacon of liberty for the world and a place to come seeking economic opportunity, religious freedom, and other important human values.
Allow me just to briefly set the stage before I introduce our panelists.
The founders crafted the Declaration to honor continuity as much as a call to independence and rebellion.
If you recall the words in the Declaration they signed, they justified independence by saying, by writing, prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.
And accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed, close quote.
Likewise, in subsequent founding documents such as the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the objective of the framers was to advance the goal of individual liberty, to protect those in unalienable rights, but also to maintain an ordered liberty.
They sought to discourage the possibilities of future revolt.
George Washington's suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion demonstrated that our leaders at the time would even use force to curtail rebellion.
The Framers' approach set our young republic on a course towards prosperity beyond anything previously imagined, creating remarkable stability.
The history of Europe in roughly that same period reminds us the founders did not have to insist on this moderation and revolution, as Coolidge pointed out.
France, of course, saw revolt followed by revolt.
That's the counterfactual.
As we heard from earlier panels, the American colonists saw themselves as inheritors of a great tradition and a free country.
The colonists enjoyed strong property rights, direct representation on local assemblies and easy access to common law courts.
In short, they enjoyed the rights of Englishmen.
Their strong civic culture led to a crisis when Parliament and the Crown began infringing on their rights.
Parliament started levying taxes, of course, without consent, demanded strict enforcement of the Navigation Acts, cutting the colonies off from the thriving trade that helped them be successful.
Worse yet, as we heard, the Crown started dismissing assemblies that had developed organically in the colonies, like the House of Burgesses.
The documents the founders penned and the events of the American Revolution are, of course, still central to Americans today, or at least should be.
Yet what actually took place at that time is probably slightly different than many of our history books suggest, and that's what this panel will be emphasizing today, some of the surprises from that period.
Well, allow me to introduce our outstanding panelists.
After we hear from each, we'll follow the pattern of the previous panels and have a great conversation.
Our first speaker is William Allen, who's Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy and Dean at the James Madison College of Michigan State University.
I've known him because he's taught for us in the past at the Fund for American Studies.
He's a great scholar of political thought, his most recent publication being a new critical edition of Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws.
Today he'll be speaking about the understudied side of George III.
Professor Allen is also a recipient of a Bradley Prize.
Our second speaker will be John Burlaugh, Senior Fellow and Director of Finance Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
John was gracious to join this panel when one of our speakers had to cancel.
You'll find his full biography in your packets today if you want to read more about John's work.
I will mention a few things that pertain to his role here today.
He's the author of a book, George Washington, Entrepreneur, How Our Founding Fathers' Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World.
The book received rave reviews in the Wall Street Journal and was endorsed by eminent historians like Richard Brookheiser, Craig Shirley, and Abity Schlays.
John is a contributing editor to Forbes and his pieces appear in many other publications.
Just one more thing relevant to his appearance today perhaps is he's the author of a widely cited paper called the Declaration of Crowdfunding Independence, Finance of the People, by the People and for the People.
Our third speaker will be Congressman French Hill.
Congressman Hill has represented Arkansas' second congressional district with distinction in the House of Representatives since 2015.
Representative Hill, as I think Amity mentioned, is a keen student of history and especially the American founding.
Today he will speak to us about the editorial process that took the Declaration from Jefferson's draft to the public document we know it today.
Our fourth speaker is Professor Alan Gelzo.
Professor Gelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, where he also directs their initiatives on politics and statesmanship.
He gives a wonderful lecture on the whiskey rebellion in the Great Books course, a rebellion that Washington personally put down.
But today I'll be speaking about a figure and likewise represented a quirky but real threat to ordered liberty, citizen Genet.
Dr. Gelzo is also a recipient of a Bradley Prize.
So we will begin with Professor Allen.
Thank you very much, Roger, and thanks to Abbott Schways and trustees and to all of you who are participating here, and particularly to Judge Rogers Brown,
who last evening brought to us an address that encapsulates in important ways how that little spark of celestial natural law has permeated in our thinking since the period of the earlier bicentennials 50 years ago.
That project of renovation about which Danielle spoke in the previous session is well underway.
I am fairly sanguine in reporting as I come this afternoon to address the question of George III in particular, but in relationship to what we understand of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.
So I will take just a few moments to provide for you an overview and some hints about what I have discovered through what have been patient researches to this point with some patient study yet to go.
I published this time a year ago my translation and commentary on Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, only to discover as I completed that major project that George III,
King of England, had anticipated the work himself in a very extensive paraphrase we might call, but very nearly a translation of the spirit of the laws that had gone unheralded all this time because the Georgian archives hadn't been opened until 2019.
So as I consulted those notes and the long list of other notes and essays written by George III, I encountered an intellect and a spirit quite unknown to us as we have portrayed him from the Revolution.
In fact, as I demonstrated in my discussion of this, I discovered, far from being a tyrant, George III was a liberal reformer.
And as you listen to the conversations about the divisions among Whigs in the late 18th century and the project of liberal reform, it will doubtlessly come to you as something of a mind-bender now to have to make room for George III as participating in that entire process.
But I assure you, that is the case.
There are multiple indications of this, but none of them will be more important than understanding how George ascended to the throne in 1760 with the resolve to cure what he regarded as pernicious constitutional practices in Britain.
Not to change the British Constitution, but to save the British Constitution because constitutional practices had fallen into a perverse cul-de-sac.
One of the ways in which this comes to light is in revisiting that history and seeing what the influences were on George III, including Bolingbrook's idea of a patriot king and his essay on the state of parties.
In that essay on the state of parties, Bolingbroke looks back beyond the era of George III's grandfather, George II, and brings the analysis up to the point just short of the fall of Robert Walpole and the end of the pretensions of the Scottish successor.
So he describes what essentially are the practices of Whigs who evolved from an era in which they could be called high-minded to the era in which what came to exist was what can be called the Whig oligarchy.
For it was a Whig oligarchy that prevailed at the end of the reign of George II.
A Whig oligarchy against which George III, the youth, reacted with great vehemence.
Now, this Whig oligarchy was the gatekeeper, or you might say the storehouse, for those constitutional practices of place-seeking and revenue-seeking, or rent-seeking, that had come to dominate the British government and constitution.
They eventuated in the civil list, which became an endless source of controversy and crisis in Britain because there was no end to the civil list.
It began in certain modest form, and it had certain benefits for the society.
The civil list actually returned to boroughs or communities some benefits, even though they came in the form of royal bounty or largest passed through the hands of favorites.
But these favorites came to be increasingly seen as participating in a process of factional rule.
They came into favor because they were instrumental in the purchase of seats in commons, or in other ways important in constructing a ministry in support of the king with majority support in the parliament.
So that background I give you in order to have you appreciate what it was George III was reacting to and wished to reform.
And so he set out as king, announcing he wanted a government of measures, not men.
And that's how he proclaimed his intention to put an end to faction.
Unfortunately, George III thought putting an end to faction meant putting an end to political party.
And it is important for us to understand that the famous Whig-Tory distinction that we know so well has very little to play in the development of these particular political events from the end of George II's reign through the revolutionary period.
The real actors are the various Whigs, the components of Whig rump factions, because there was not a single grouping of Whigs that was coherent.
George, however, thought you can't get rid of faction without getting rid of parties, against which the strongest liberal Whigs reacted with great vehemence.
And that was expressed by no one openly, publicly, and with demonstrable effect more greatly than Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke became the great liberal or even radical spokesman. for the liberal Whigs in opposition to the crown.
And while I can't rehearse the whole story, Burke's essay on the present state of our discontents is a remarkable, a remarkable view of what was taking place in Britain at the time.
My time's up already.
What was taking place was a constitutional crisis prompted by the king's resolve to reform and the reaction to that resolve by the Whigs, beginning with the Rockingham Ministry, which Burke served as secretary.
He also was in company with the Duke of Richmond, Thomas Paine, ghostwriter to the Duke of Richmond, as you heard Danielle speak about, Allman, and a number of other parties eventually connecting with those who made the transition in Britain in the form of Lord Shelburne and the younger William Pitt.
So we're talking about a period that extends from 1760 to the end of the 1780s in which the Whig reformers in opposition to the crown reshaped the British Constitution.
That's what I want you to underscore.
While there was a revolution in the United States, there was an incomplete process of constitutional reform going on in Britain.
So what is the implication for the American Revolution?
The American revolutionaries were completely innocent of this constitutional crisis in Britain.
Burke himself calls it a constitutional crisis.
He says, we are out of humor with our Constitution.
All the political evidence, all of the events demonstrate that it was a constitutional crisis.
The Americans were innocent of the constitutional crisis.
What they didn't see was that the attempt to assert the supremacy, not the equality of commons, but the supremacy of commons, required commons to make the imprudent steps that commons undertook with regard to the colonies, because that was part and parcel of asserting their supremacy.
What is the practical implication of their supremacy?
Ministries, executive authority, executive administration must emerge upon the nomination of the commons.
The discretion of the monarch has to be eliminated with regard to the ministry, prime minister on down.
That was the tremendous change that brought into being the principle of popular rule manifested by the efforts in favor of universal suffrage.
Not all the liberals agreed with that.
Burke didn't sign on to that.
But they all signed on to government by consent of the people, popular rule, the people as the authority in the government from which all other authorities legitimately derive.
In other words, what you see in the Declaration of Independence was happening on a different plane in Britain at the same time.
And what has happened in Britain created the environment that led to the incidents that sparked the American Revolution.
This does not alter the global view of the American Revolution because they still had to deliberate the American Revolution.
But it establishes some things fairly clearly, and I don't have time to go into them all for you, but they establish particularly clearly that what the Americans did in the Declaration of Independence was rather to recognize an existing reality than to create a new reality.
I want to underscore that for you.
I could go at length into demonstrating why that is, including showing you how some of the sentiments that led to the revolution began in the 1740s already, when Sam Adams was impoverished in the land bank scandal in Massachusetts, and when Sam Adams Jr. became radicalized and became, as Stacey Schiff has reported, instrumental in shaping the revolution itself.
So we find ourselves very close to the point of having to acknowledge that the American Revolution was a byblow of what was effectively a revolution in England.
Not a result of tyranny, but a result of political instability, but political instability that the English themselves finally got control of to produce dramatic modern innovations, which innovations were paralleled subsequently and indigenously in the Americas.
My last word, so that you know at least what one of the modern innovations was.
It was the invention of the programmatic political party.
Burke's response to the king's desire to get rid of parties was to defend parties, but also to defend them on the basis of an analysis which says they did not have to be factions.
And that analysis he presents to us in terms which declare that the party must be an association of people committed in advance to an explicit program to be approved by voters.
And from that source would spring legitimacy.
In that way, popular government became the foundation of government in Britain and shaped the future course of British constitutional development, just as it became in a different context and different institutional form in what became the United States.
My phone was, I think, telling me that my AI was saying, let him keep going.
Now we'll skip down to Professor Gelso and we'll hear from him.
Bon journe mais estimi.
I begin, a la Française, because Amity asked if I would talk about a character, a French connection, you might say, to the American Revolutionary era.
One hot Sunday in August 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont toiled up a high hill overlooking the Hudson River, a few Miles above Albany and began inquiring at the house there for a Monsieur Genet.
Tocqueville was gathering materials for the book which would become Democracy in America, and he wanted to speak with a man who had, almost 40 years before, been a French diplomat in America who could converse with him in French.
In the event, we have no clear idea of what Tocqueville and Monsieur Genet discussed, since Tocqueville made no mention of Monsieur Genet in Democracy in America, and with good reason, too, since Monsieur Genet was, in fact, the notorious Edmond Charles Genet, who had lit the powder for an embarrassing diplomatic collision of two revolutionary republics, France and the United States.
And Tocqueville was uncertain whether he should publicize his visit.
As it turned out, he needn't have worried.
The man who became known simply as Citizen Genet started out on a very different foot.
Born in 1763 to a modest, bourgeois bureaucrat family, Genet gravitated into the King of France's foreign service and was France's chargé d'Affaire at the court of Catherine the Great when the Revolution broke out in 1789.
He was intelligent, quick-witted, facile in his grasp of languages, and at definitely the wrong place in St. Petersburg as the Russian Empress was planning to join a British-led coalition in making war on the new revolutionary regime in France.
Genet returned to Paris and attached himself to the Girondin, who then controlled France's national convention.
In November of 1792, he was named the Republic's diplomatic minister to the United States.
Genet was not a radical like the Girondins' rivals, the Jacobins, but when he arrived in Charleston on board the aptly named 36-gun frigate Ambuscade, the ambush, on April 8th, 1793, he met with what seemed to be all the radical adulation a revolutionary Frenchman could have wished for.
And he accommodated himself accordingly by handing out letters of marque, which were used in the 18th century to commission civilian vessels as privateers who would hunt down merchant vessels on the high seas.
He commissioned four vessels with American crews with letters of marque from the French Republic without bothering to get permission from President Washington's administration in Philadelphia.
Ignoring such diplomatic niceties, Genet set off for Philadelphia on April 18th, expecting to be welcomed with the firing of cannon and other demonstrations of joy.
And why not?
Had not France been America's great ally in its revolution?
Did not France and America have a diplomatic treaty which bound them to at least some degree of reciprocity?
Most important, were they not now the two leading examples of Republican revolution in a world of aristocrats?
That certainly was the opinion of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who expected that Genet's arrival in Philadelphia would furnish an occasion for the people to testify their affections for Republican France.
It was not, however, the opinion of George Washington, who saw no advantage whatsoever to being dragged into the French Republic's war with Britain and its aristocratic allies.
Even before Genet reached Philadelphia, Washington had assembled his cabinet to query them about issuing a proclamation of neutrality, a proclamation which, in fact, he released on April 22nd.
So much so that Jefferson cooperated grudgingly, but fearing that, for all practical purposes, our treaty with France is void.
Citizen Genet arrived in the American capital on May 16th, three days after the first of the privateers he had commissioned showed up there with a British prize in tow.
He had an ambitious agenda.
He would use Philadelphia as the platform from which to preach uprisings among francophone populations in British Canada and in Spanish-ruled Florida and Louisiana.
He would negotiate a new alliance between France and the United States that would mingle their commercial and political interests.
He would license more privateers to use American ports and ships to raid British commerce.
And he would demand, politely, that Americans liquidate the last of their Revolutionary War debts to France so that the Girondistes could finance their war against Britain.
All of this put Thomas Jefferson in an exceedingly difficult position.
On June 5th, Jefferson had to advise Genet that President Washington had concluded that the arming and equipping vessels in the ports of the United States to cruise against nations with whom they are at peace was incompatible with the territorial sovereignty of the United States.
And so no French privateers could be outfitted or received in American ports.
A week later, he had to inform Genet again that there would be no advances on the American debt to France.
Genet responded in fury.
Washington was wrong to see the privateers as a violation of sovereignty, and even more wrong to slow walk payments of the debt.
Moreover, Genet believed he had the opinion of all true Americans, L'Évre Americans, on his side, and they would force its government to make common cause with us.
Jefferson struggled repeatedly to warn Genet through June and July that he was tempting an explosion from Washington.
But Genet contemptuously replied that Washington was not the sovereign of the country, nor could he declare war or make peace.
And in July, Genet moved ahead with plans to outfit yet another privateer, the Petit Démocrat.
He did not move fast enough or in the right direction.
Washington erupted in one of his rare bursts of uncontrolled rage when he learned about the Petit Démocrat on July 11th.
Is the minister of the French Republic to set the acts of this government at defiance with impunity, Washington burst out, and then threaten the executive with an appeal to the people?
The next day, Washington's cabinet agreed to request Genet's recall.
And if Genet expected Americans to rally to his support, he was wrong on that score, too.
Public opinion, Jefferson told James Madison on August 16th, was becoming universal in support of the president against Genet.
In October, the French Committee on Public Safety agreed to the recall.
For the unhappy citizen Genet, this would involve something more risky than merely a strikeout on a diplomatic mission.
Control of the French Revolution had passed into the hands of the Jacobins, who would soon inaugurate the reign of terror and send anything that looked like dissent to the guillotine.
That included the Girondistes.
And it is likely that Genet would have joined many of his soon-to-be-headless friends in the trouble.
In fact, it was broadly rumored that his successor, Joseph Fauché, had stowed a portable guillotine on the ship bearing him to America with which to execute Genet as soon as possible.
But Washington intervened.
As long as we were in danger from his intrigues, Washington told Rufus King, we wished him ill.
But Washington would not allow that ill-wishing to become a pretext for the Jacobins to work their bloody will.
We felt compassion and were anxious he should not be sacrificed, Washington said.
And so all demands for Genet's extradition were refused.
However, short-sighted citizen Genet had been as a diplomat, he knew enough not to bite the hand that protected him.
If anything, he blended seamlessly into the fabric of life in the United States.
He married Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of New York's obstreperous governor, George Clinton, set himself up as a gentleman farmer and dabbler in scientific projects in the Hudson Valley, finally officially becoming an American citizen in 1804.
By 1821, he would become so Americanized that hardly anyone noticed when he gave an address to the Rensselaer County Agricultural Society on the means for opening new sources of wealth for the northern states, or when he was elected to the council of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York.
A decade later, Genet would be waiting peacefully on his hill for Alexis de Tocqueville, and he would die there in peace three years later on the 45th anniversary of Bastille Day.
His great-grandson, Edmond Charles Clinton Genet, would be the first American casualty of World War I. In the same year that Genet gave his Rensselaer County address, John Quincy Adams would remark that Americans do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
In the case of Edmond Charles Genet, Adams might have added that it does not even turn those who have tried to undermine it into monsters either.
There is a generosity in the American Republic experiment absent from so many other modern revolutions.
A generosity which reached its high mark in Lincoln's call for malice toward none at the end of a great civil war.
Edmond Charles Genet is an emblem of that generosity.
A generosity that allowed someone who planned to shoehorn the United States into violent conflict to become a complacent and harmless farmer.
That's not a bad aspiration for our times, either.
Thank you.
John Burlough.
Yes.
Well, Roger, thank you for the kind words and thank you.
I thank the Coolidge Foundation for the invitation to be on this great panel with such distinguished panelists.
I enjoyed hearing what Professor Allen said about George III being a reader of Montesquieu, because it turns out that the George on our side of the Atlantic, George Washington, also read more than people think that they know that he read.
Although he had to, he was forced to work as a teenager and could never afford college, unlike some of the other founding fathers, Washington was still self-educated and very well read.
And Washington's library included books on agriculture, as he was a very innovative farmer and read from others, but also included books on natural rights from philosophers such as John Locke and even early economics from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which he had a copy of and underlined passages from.
So I was very pleased, being how much we revere Adam Smith and George Washington at the Competitive Enterprise Institute to hear about that, to discover that, just like Professor Allen discovered George III's reading of Montesquieu in his research.
So I think the focus on the grievances of this panel and the facts on the ground helps us relate to understand more of the reasons for the Declaration, the conditions that created it, and helps us relate to some of the issues today.
Those who have followed the Competitive Enterprise Institute, my organization, over our four decades, know that one of our main grievances is what we call regulation without representation.
The phrase is an apt description of laws effectively made by unelected regulatory agencies in the administrative state instead of the people's representatives in Congress.
And we work with concerned political leaders like Chairman Hill here to push back against the administrative regulatory state, overstepping its authority from Congress.
Now, the phrase regulation without representation also connotes the battle that George Washington and other American patriots fought against taxation without representation.
But in researching my book, George Washington Entrepreneur, available at online venues and fine bookstores, I found that regulation without representation is more than just a connotation to the causes of the Revolutionary War.
It was an actual grievance of the colonists that was almost as important as taxation without representation in turning George Washington and other patriots against the rule of Great Britain.
In my book, I document George Washington's amazing entrepreneurship and innovation.
As mentioned, he started from a background that was humble compared to the other founding fathers and lacking resources for a college education.
He became an apprentice surveyor at 16 for the Fairfax family, namesake of Fairfax County and here in the DMV.
And then he quickly built a lucrative freelance surveying practice that was sort of the gig economy of its day and speculated in real estate by purchasing some of the land he surveyed or asking for payment in some of the real estate that he surveyed.
Land was pretty plentiful then.
And then decades later, after he acquired Mount Vernon, almost by accident, due to the untimely deaths of his older brother Lawrence and Lawrence's family, Washington abandoned tobacco as a farm's cash crop because he thought it was, and he was right that it was harming the soil, diversified into wheat and dozens of other crops, and built a grist mill, flour mill, to sift that wheat into flour that he would export throughout the colonies and to the West Indies in Great Britain.
Washington would put his name on the bags of flour, essentially trademarking the flour with a G. Washington imprint on the bags to differentiate it from other flour that was shipped to England throughout the colonies, pioneering the practice of branding that is ubiquitous today.
He turned Mount Vernon into what historian Harlow Giles Unger has called a vast agro-industrial enterprises that included a blacksmith shop to make tools such as horseshoes and nails and a mini textile factory to make clothing, the latter of which was largely run by his wife, Martha Washington.
Mount Vernon, by the way, has the grist mill and the whiskey distillery that he built after he was president in the late 1790s on display during the spring and summer.
So if you're here, you might want to come back and see that.
But these very ventures caused Washington to run into the vortex of British regulation foisted on the colonies.
The red tape stemmed from Great Britain's mercantilist trade policies.
As I write in the book, Parliament's Navigation Act gave Britain control of trade routes, and colonists could generally only export and import to and from the mother country.
Now with limited trade routes and shipping costs that were heavy from Britain, colonists began to make things as well as grow things, just as Washington did with his enterprises at Mount Vernon.
The Industrial Revolution that had taken hold in Great Britain in the 18th century was also coming to the colonies on a small-scale basis due to the efforts of individual entrepreneurs like Washington.
But the British Parliament saw colonial manufacturing upstarts like the enterprises at Mount Vernon, small as they were compared to companies in Britain, as a threat to British manufacturers.
Parliament passed laws such as the Iron Act, Hat Act, and Wool Act to sharply restrict or ban colonial entrepreneurs from making everything from nails and horseshoes to hats and wool carpets.
In the 1760s, when Britain started aggressively levying new taxes, sometimes the regulations and taxes went hand in hand.
For instance, one of the grievances about the Stamp Act was not just the cost of the taxes for paper, but the fact that they had to use British paper when Benjamin Franklin and others were investing in paper mills here in America.
And even if no law specifically forbade the manufacture of a product, entrepreneurs knew that their new mill or factory could be closed at the whim of British officials if domestic manufacture of the product made the colonies less of a captive market.
Seeing the arbitrary nature of new British taxes and regulations, as I write in my book, Washington increasingly perceived a threat to all that he had built.
He expressed this fear in a 1769 letter to his neighbor, George Mason, who himself would become a significant founding father.
In the letter, Washington worries that if Great Britain can, quote, order me to buy goods of them loaded with duties, they may also, quote, forbid my manufacturing.
British regulation that would shut down his enterprises seemed to be Washington's biggest worry, and his fear was shared by many colonial manufacturing entrepreneurs.
In his book, Forced Founders, progressive historian Woody Holton calls the British taxes the proverbial, quote, straw that broke the camel's back on top of the, quote, heavy tax already paid to Britain in the form of the costly monopoly of their trade and the regulations accompanying these mercantilist policies.
And it says too much, and Holton says too much attention is paid to the straw and not to the burden the camel already carried.
Washington and Mason continued their conversation as the events such as the Boston Tea Party in 1773 moved the American colonies toward the revolution.
In July 1774, shortly after Virginia's royal governor shut down the House of Burgesses for issuing proclamations against the British government, Washington and Mason sat down in Man Vernon and penned the Fairfax Resolves in its list of 24 resolves or revolutions.
While not calling for independence from Great Britain, it expressed the increasing disenchantment with the colonists with the mercantilist arrangement and the accompanying cost of the new regulation in light of the heavy onset of new taxation from Britain.
The document was signed by 24 leading residents of Fairfax County.
It would be presented one month later in August 1774 to the delegates of the Virginia Convention and then was presented to the Continental Congress, almost certainly influencing the declaration that members of Congress would ratify two years later.
In the book, I argue that Washington's entrepreneurial activities not only motivated him toward revolution, they were a significant reason, in addition to, of course, his military experience in the French and Indian War, that they chose him to lead the revolution.
Adams specifically mentioned Washington's independent fortune, quote unquote, in his nominating speech, nominating him to be general in 1775.
So I think we can say that his talents as an entrepreneur specifically played a role in George Washington, and the grievances led to things in our Constitution, like that Article 1, Section 1, that all laws have to be made by the legislature, not by the executive branch,
and that these are some of the issues we face with the administrative state today when bureaucracies effectively make laws that were not approved by the people that were our regulation without representation.
And again, I thank you for hearing my presentation.
Congressman Hill.
french hill ▲ ● ▼
Well, good afternoon.
It's terrific to be with all of you today and our students, our scholars, and great to be on this distinguished panel.
My charge from Amity today is the edits to the Declaration, and it's entitled Mangling Jefferson.
Edits to the Declaration.
Thanks to poor Richard, for two decades, every member of the Continental Congress was well aware that haste makes waste.
But those last days of June and early July 1776 cast doubt over the universality of Franklin's prudent proverb.
The Second Continental Congress's decision around independence was no longer just a debating point.
It wasn't hypothetical.
Individual colonial assemblies, as has just been mentioned, had developed their own list of grievances over the past two years and calls for independence, many patterned on Jefferson's own declaration of the causes and necessity For taking up arms from the previous year, or his mass-distributed pamphlet in 1774, entitled A Summary of the Views of the Rights of British America, which was drafted for the House of Burgess in Virginia.
Each state was now drafting their own Constitution as an independent state in a United States of America.
That spring of 1776, Jefferson had sequestered himself at his beloved Monticello, where he was preoccupied with drafting his own ideas for the Virginia Constitution, grieving the loss of his mother, who had just passed away in March, and worrying about his wife's third pregnancy in six years, likely all contributing to once again one of his suffering from stress-induced migraines that plagued him his whole life.
But in May, he descended from his Olympus and made the 300-mile 10-day journey up to Philadelphia.
And he got to Philadelphia in late May of 1776.
There, he moved into the grafts home at Market Street at 7th and accompanied by his recently acquired writing desk and Windsor chair.
Just a few weeks later, in June, June 11th, Congress appointed a committee of five people to draft the Declaration of Independence.
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Livingston were all charged with a declaration that would unite the colonies, bind the delegates, and inform the world of America's intent to be independent.
From this crew, drafting fell to Jefferson.
Sherman and Livingston didn't have any add any value to this project.
Franklin had gout, wasn't in town, and had an aversion to any writing projects.
And Adams wanted to save himself for leading the debate on the House floor for independence.
So Jefferson set to work, and he possessed an encyclopedic lexicon of British, French, and classical political philosophy.
But maybe most importantly, he had his own work of the past several years: Causes of Necessity, Rights of British America, combined with his top of mind three recent drafts just in the last few weeks of the Virginia Constitution.
Timely also was the Pennsylvania Gazette publishing Virginia's House of Burgess, unanimous adopting on June 12th, the day after the Committee of Five was appointed, George Mason's preamble to that draft state constitution, enshrining the rights of life, liberty, and the means in acquiring and possessing property.
Jefferson holed up in the graft house and went to work.
We could picture him in that second floor window on Market Street, writing, crossing out, perfecting, then copying his final version onto one of his unique Jeffersonian worksheets.
After a week of sipping tea, toiling at the Randolph desk, singing and humming to himself, Jefferson put his quill down and was satisfied enough to share a rough draft with Adams and Franklin.
The sage of Monticello, Monticello, was miserable for the next 10 days as the committee and then Congress at whole debated his declaration.
In all, some 86 changes were made to Jefferson's rough draft.
First to strike were Adams and Franklin.
Adams believed that Jefferson was over the top in portraying King George as a tyrant, but he offered no specific edit.
He changed the words colonies to states, clearly noting America's changing status.
And Adams also inserted the idea of a new grievance regarding forced change of venue for colonial legislatures.
Franklin, one of America's most revered editors and printers, received the document after Adams and Jefferson's continued tinkering.
He made seven changes and practiced his trade by correcting their grammar and spelling.
Together, they went easy on the author with just 10 changes between Adams and Franklin.
It was Jefferson's own improvements during those same few days, post-review of Adams and Franklin, that were among the most memorable to all of us.
It's his edits that included dissolve the political bands, separate and equal, endowed by their creator, and of course one that was so interesting compared to George Mason's words in Williamsburg, pursuit of happiness rather than acquiring property.
It was Jefferson's view that it's not just having the property, it's the freedom to do with that property what you wish as you lead your life.
So finally, on June 28th, it was showtime, and Congress converted, convened to hear Jefferson read his Declaration.
It was Dr. Franklin's first day back since June 11th because of gout, and he and Adams were present to engage and listen to Congress's reaction to Jefferson's document.
History doesn't provide any clues as to the contribution from committee members Sherman and Livingston, but Johnson, I mean, Jefferson stood and read the Declaration after which it was tabled until it was time for a vote on the resolution for independence, which took place on July 2nd, where Lee's resolution from Virginia that these United Colonies are and of the right ought to be free and independent states.
Now, John Boehner, who was the Speaker of the House when I first came to Congress, always had one of his maxims was, Congress moves very slowly until it doesn't.
And the next two days will prove Boehner right and demonstrate why Franklin's aphorism, haste makes waste, isn't always on point.
With strong objections from Georgia's South Carolina, the Committee of the Whole removed Jefferson's entire passage on the slave trade.
In Jefferson's drafting, he was attempting to make two points.
First, he was trying to take a principled stand against both slavery and the slave trade.
Historians believe that Jefferson was torn between the romantic notion of Americans' origins and the brutal reality of slavery in attempting to argue, and this is quoting from Jefferson's first draft, since the colonists had nothing to do with establishing slavery, they were the unfortunate victim of English barbarism, that they could not be blamed for its continuance.
Jefferson's draft also accused the king of blocking colonial efforts to end the trade, and then at the same time condemning the king for exciting those very people to rise up in arms against us.
In any event, Congress saw through this twisted logic and hypocrisy, as well as the economic considerations of some states, and they pulled Jefferson's entire section out.
As to the king's urging of revolts, they modified Grievance 17, which was then restated as, excited domestic insurrections among us, which each of the delegates understood to be referencing both Indians and slaves.
Next, the delegates took issue with another structural component of Jefferson's obsession in his first version of the Declaration, and is an echo of the professor's comments about Whig origins.
Jefferson went on for paragraphs in his belief that colonists moved to America, constructed their livelihoods without any advantages or protection based on the strength of the mother country, Great Britain.
In his draft, Jefferson asserted that the colonial success was, quote, effected at the expense of our own blood and treasure, unassisted by the wealth or strength of Great Britain.
Well, in the rights of British America, he wrote earlier, America was conquered and her settlements made and firmly establishment at the expense of individuals, not of the British public.
So he's echoing from his previous document.
He just is seemingly forgetting that tiny, tiny detail that the British king had driven the French out of North America.
Jefferson was over the top here.
The delegates recognized it as such, leaving only the acceptable change that we reminded them of the circumstance of our immigration and settlement here.
Throughout the draft, Jefferson worked to build a convincing case that the American colonists had no choice but to declare their independence from the king, the British Parliament, and by extension the British people.
And again, the Committee of the Whole softened his language about the references to the British people, taking out, for example, to declare our separation from the British as eternal.
I got to wrap up by thinking Pauline Meyer's great discussion about the work of the Committee of the Whole in her book, American Scripture, she had a great one line in it, which was, this was no hack editing job.
And it's amazing, as elegant as it is, that that committee, all those men gathered, produced a document that was even stronger, more clear, and truly representative of the delegates assembled.
So in conclusion, Jefferson didn't see it that way, of course.
He copied his earlier draft and shared it with all his friends, saying it was superior.
And he sent it to his pal, Richard Henry Lee, who had carried the resolution on the House floor.
And upon studying Jefferson's original draft, Lee wrote Thomas and said, the manuscript had been, I wish the manuscript had not been mangled as it was.
The authors in the room, those legislators who have confidence of their own drafting, you know, that mangling is something we all deal with as legislators.
All of you that are writers deal with editors that are manglers.
But unfortunately, Jefferson just couldn't handle it.
And he just was sweating bullets during this whole process.
And he was sitting next to Dr. Franklin during this time.
And Franklin said that Jefferson was not insensitive to these mutilations.
So he told the story of Dr. Thompson.
It seems that one John Thompson was a hatter, and he was going to open a beautiful new store.
And he said, and he had a beautiful sign he was going to have made.
And the sign was going to have a lovely hat on it, and it says, John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money with the illustration of a hat.
Franklin said that friends had offered Thompson some advice.
One proposed taking out Hatter since it was redundant with makes hats.
Another recommended that makes should be removed since customers wouldn't care who actually made the hats.
A third said for ready money wasn't necessary since it wasn't our custom here to sell on credit.
And finally, sells hat, a fourth commented, did Thompson think that people thought he was going to give them away?
So in the end, it was just simply John Thompson with a picture of a hat.
So I asked ChatGPT what that would look like, and here it is.
Fantastic.
So maybe ChatGPT has some greater purpose in life.
Thank you very much.
unidentified
Congressman, I think you should take the declaration, put that in chat GPT, and see what it comes up with.
Jefferson will be turning in his grave, no doubt.
Well, I have a number of questions I'd love to ask each of the panelists, but I want to leave as much time as possible for the fellows, the scholars to ask questions.
But let me just throw something out first.
Does anyone have any comments about Professor Allen's thesis about George III?
And I mentioned also that the Library of Congress has an exhibit coming up called The Two Georges on George III and George Washington.
I think that's going to be great to see.
But any other thoughts about Professor Allen's, I thought, very persuasive and interesting analysis of George III's support for a government of measures and not men and precursor to our revolution?
Well, I think the talk was fascinating.
I do have some, and it's definitely worthy of more study, just as a study of, you know, including of what George III read as far as what George Washington read.
And we're finding that out through some Washington's letters and diaries and actually bills of sales of what books he bought that are still being released.
The one thing I think I would slightly disagree with is that it wasn't tyrannical.
It was getting to be tyrannical with some of the things I mentioned with the regulations, with the stamping out colonial manufacturing.
And also one of the big grievances was, of course, not having jury trials, the admiralty courts that would kidnap citizens, take them to Halifax, try them without a jury.
So it was, you know, they were losing, they felt they were losing their rights as Englishmen.
So this was maybe not certainly as tyrannical as the regimes we've seen of the 20th century.
And it's some things our government has done today recently.
But I think you can argue that there were certain tyrannies that the founding fathers were right to stand up to abuses of liberty.
And Congressman Hill, we had quite a bit of discussion this morning about the words life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness instead of using the word property.
Have you considered more about that and why that change was made?
french hill ▲ ● ▼
Well, it wasn't a term that Jefferson used in its original kind of John Locke format and that he knew very well the drafts of the Virginia Constitution that were being drafted.
He was reading literally in real time when he's sitting on Market Street.
He's reading the Pennsylvania Gazette with George Mason's actual as voted on by the House of Burgesses and he chose not to put that in.
And so I can't speculate personally about it.
I'd urge my colleagues on the panel to.
But from what I've read, it was the use of property and the freedom of using that property for in a very classic American sense that I think he chose to describe that whole element as the pursuit of happiness.
unidentified
Any other thoughts on that?
Well, yeah, go ahead.
I'm happy to speak to it.
This is not on.
Yeah.
I say I'm happy to speak to that because I've written on the question with respect to John Adams' anticipation of the Declaration.
And Adams, of course, in drafting the proclamation of the General Court of Massachusetts in January of 76, used the expression of pursuit of happiness, as he did also in his thoughts concerning government, and more importantly, elaborated its meaning.
And its meaning had virtually nothing to do with property per se, though Adams certainly recommended to recognize the instrumentality of property in order to accomplish the works of virtue and excellence.
And as one reads through the proclamation to the general court, one sees that that is at least what the initial introduction of the term pursuit of happiness means, and perhaps is related to its being introduced in the deliberations of the committee at the Declaration of Independence.
So I think we have tortured ourselves somewhat in trying to educe from John Locke the fullness of the meaning of the term pursuit of happiness, when in fact it emerges quite independently of John Locke's analysis.
So we mustn't prostrate the Declaration to John Locke, in my view.
Professor Galzo, your remarks, your paper there, brought to mind the response of George Washington to the Whiskey Rebellion.
We had Shea's rebellion.
Do you have any thoughts on how those events shaped our country in the future?
Washington was not a man you trifled with.
He was very reserved, not a man of many words.
And yet, if you could antagonize him, and there were some people who did, you would receive as a response a genuinely volcanic eruption.
This becomes apparent, perhaps at its rawest state, in the case of Charles Lee at Monmouth Courthouse, where Charles Lee simply botched things, and Washington was beside himself with anger.
And it was as though an entirely different Washington was on display.
It was the kind of moment when you really didn't want to be in the same area code with Washington.
Washington had high expectations of people.
You could not, Hamilton once said, you could not be more than three minutes early to an appointment or more than three minutes late.
Otherwise, Washington would not have anything to do with you.
So Washington had great expectations of people.
In the case of the whiskey rebels, there was no question in his mind that the whiskey rebels were traitors and they needed to be treated that way.
On the other hand, once the whiskey rebellion collapses, and it didn't have very far to collapse, it was not much of a rebellion.
It is hard to stage a rebellion under the influence of whiskey.
And though the whiskey rebels were tried and found guilty, he then turned and pardoned them.
So you find in Washington, yes, high expectations, but you also find, in a very surprising way, a remarkable sense of indulgence, forgiveness, moderation.
Danielle Allen used the term moderation, or I believe, if not Danielle, then it was Yuval talking about a moderation within which sphere the American revolutionaries operated.
There's a wonderful story that was told by Elias Boudino that on one occasion a farmer near Washington's winter encampment at Morristown gave away the password for admission to the camp.
There were people in Washington's staff who wanted this farmer at once arrested and executed.
And Washington quizzed Boudinot and his officers.
Boudinot mostly was a witness to this, but he quizzed his officers, on what strength do you have the information that this man gave away, the password?
And they said, well, we were told this by another person.
Washington's response was, you would hang a man on third-hand testimony?
No, we cannot do this, and we cannot set that kind of an example for our revolution.
And Boudinot was so struck by that.
There's another wonderful story of Boudinot later in Washington's career when he has been elected president and is coming to New York to be inaugurated.
And when he steps off the barge at the foot of Manhattan, he's greeted there by an officer with a regiment of militia who are going to escort him.
And Washington sort of gently says, no, you don't need to do that.
All the protection that I require is in the hearts of the people.
That speaks of an aspect of Washington, a gentility of spirit that we don't often attribute to the man, and yet which went into making him our indispensable figure in the revolution.
Thank you.
Well, let's see if we can take some questions.
A lot of hands up.
We'll start back here.
There are two right there, I think.
On your right.
Yeah.
Oh, thanks.
Thanks, Rob.
Please identify.
Yeah.
I'm Charles Miller from North Carolina.
I'm part of the Coolidge Senators Program.
I just had a question regarding, I guess, the French Revolution versus the American Revolution.
What differences would the panel highlight between both the French and the American approach to Republican government that led to such different outcomes in each of these respective revolutions?
Maybe one of our professors would like to tackle that.
Sure, I'm happy to speak to it in the context of the remarks that I made.
I suggested that the innovation, the modern innovation of programmatic political parties was extremely important, both in Britain and in the United States.
The contrast between the programmatic political party and the ideological political party is at the heart of contemporary political developments between freedom and totalitarianism.
The defense of the programmatic political party that Burke gave included the proposition that it must also preserve opposition, a divergence of opinion within the society at large.
So one expects a majority party to prevail without stamping out dissenting opinion, whereas the ideological party requires to stamp out dissenting opinion.
The attempts in the French Revolution to purify French culture of non-approved references, whether religious or otherwise, signify what the ideological party looks like.
So what we have in the contrast between the French Revolution and the English and American revolutions is precisely that modern distinction.
Either you will live with programmatic parties that preserve dissent and do not try to stifle it, or you will have ideological parties that seek to stifle dissent.
And I don't need to reinforce the contemporary significance of that observation.
All right, we'll take another and leave that insight.
I don't know where the mic is, but sure, we'll go here and then we'll try to get over here.
Hi, good afternoon.
My name is Brandon Chang and I'm from Los Angeles.
I actually find the Congressman's Poster Board to be especially timely because I have a question for you, Mr. Berlau, and your comments about the state of regulation.
And I think that that's an issue that's sort of grown on lines that are not especially partisan as the Supreme Court appears likely to uphold the TikTok ban and we see the advent of artificial intelligence.
So my question for you is, Where do you draw a line and what's the advice that you would provide to lawmakers like Congressman Hill and on the Hill on issues like regulation in the context of artificial intelligence and our national security in the context of our foreign adversaries?
That's a very good question.
I think one place to draw the line is that regulators should not make the laws.
They should enforce the laws.
The SEC should not be able to call to stretch Congress's authority over navigable waterways and call a small pond on a farm or a wetland a navigable waterway subject to the Clean Water Act, no matter how noble their motivation is.
It's not up to the SEC to determine whether a cryptocurrency is a security when it's really not like a stock or bond and there's no ownership.
That's up to Congress to do.
So the regulators should not overstep the authority that Congress has given them.
That should be first principle.
That should be the first principle, as it is in Article 1, Section 1.
Washington himself mentioned in his farewell address, he called for caution in those entrusted with its, meaning the federal government's administration, to combine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another.
So that's something the Loper-Bright decision really did, and we should also have in Congress to enforce it in addition to the Congressional Review Act, which they were going to be using to overturn a lot of, in my opinion, ill-thought regulations.
But we argue that something like the Reigns Act or going even further, that Congress must be able to affirmatively approve all regulations that bureaucrats push through.
So there is no regulation with representation, and the elected representatives have a say over the laws and policies governing us, not unelected bureaucrats.
So that's where the first line should be drawn.
Thank you.
Over here?
Mayor 1.
Or two.
Hi, Congressman.
Thank you for the wonderful display of the digital asset skills that you've built up these past few years.
I want to continue.
We had a lot of conversations earlier in the day about property, what constitutes property, the scope of property rights.
And one thing you've spoken on at length for a real challenge for the next couple years is going to be developing a comprehensive digital asset regulatory framework.
And it feels like a very ripe political moment to be able to achieve that.
So can you speak a little bit more from the philosophical side of how you're thinking about approaching this, the scope of property, really those first principles governing how you think about this issue and how you want to shape this process going forward?
french hill ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, thank you.
It's a good question.
And it is a good philosophical question.
And we've just seen our lives transformed before, you know, really right daily since the advent of the late 1990s and the internet's expansion from open protocols like email, for example, and the internet itself is just an open operating system.
There's no governance to it per se.
And suddenly you could, instead of writing a letter and using international postage, you could email your friend from college you hadn't seen in 20 years in Italy over this electronic device.
It was very open.
And that data was your data.
You had the email that you wrote.
You had the response from that person.
And there was really no intermediary in that.
So what we've seen, though, is a corporate network effect in the internet where our individual property rights have been taken away from us by the ubiquitous checking of a box at the bottom of every app you have that says terms and conditions and you simply accept them.
And you're ceding your property right intellectually and to your data, your use of data, your preferences when you do that.
And what I think in the future, what we're doing in Congress, is we want to make sure that blockchain operating systems can be put in place, and that will enshrine individual property rights on the web and allow people to create new ways to share music or share art or share intellectual property that are not on a corporate platform, which would be obviously Google search or X or Facebook.
Those would be classic examples.
And in financial services, that's important too.
And we can't just do it without changing the law.
So Congress has to design this.
The administrative state cannot do it.
We want to enshride privacy.
We want to enshrine property rights.
unidentified
And we have to do that through acts of Congress.
Well, we'll listen to one more question.
We may not be able to answer it, but let's see.
We have two minutes.
I don't know where the microphones went.
I wonder if I could just intervene just for a second.
The student who had a question before.
You are from LA.
Your family is safe.
That's what I found with special design.
All right.
We want to remember all of our fellow countrymen in this time for them.
Oh, it's me.
Perfect.
Thank you so much to the whole panel for speaking.
My name is John Augustin.
I am a Coolidge 2024 senator from a suburb 20 miles west of Chicago, Illinois.
I had a question in particular about Washington's leadership qualities, which we kind of divulged on.
And I'll leave this question open if the professors want to say it at all.
I guess, what balance did Washington strike in particular to his leadership during the Revolutionary War and beyond in between achievement versus jurisprudence?
Because we kind of saw relations between those two and also a conflict between those two.
So what's your take on that generally?
All right, we have one minute.
I'm happy to talk about it.
My work on Washington, of course, addresses this at great length, but I'm only going to speak at the moment on my comparison with George III and George Washington and lean on George III's recognition of Washington's greatness, his great leadership.
And so I pointed out that when he says of Washington that he was the most distinguished man living, that was not the grudging sentiment of a sore loser.
That was the appreciation of a man whose own elevation was high and who recognized the comparable elevation and superior elevation of George Washington.
So I take George III's evaluation of George Washington's leadership as a decisive commentary on that, in much the manner that I appreciate Winston Churchill's appreciation of Rommel's tactics in the deserts of North Africa in World War II.
You go to greatness to identify greatness.
You don't take an opinion poll.
And so if we lean on greatness, we say Washington was a great leader.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country.
Coming up this morning, we'll talk about the national mood this 4th of July weekend and discuss other political news of the day.
First with Ed Dean of WBOB Radio in Jacksonville, Florida.
Then Arnie Arneson of WNHN Radio in Concord, New Hampshire.
Lincoln Square Media CEO and Executive Editor Susan Dimash.
John Anthony of WDTK The Answer Radio in Detroit, Michigan.
Carolina Journal's senior political analyst Mitch Kokai.
And Dean Obadala of The Dean Obadala Show on Sirius XM Progress.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern this morning on C-SPAN.
C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app or online at c-span.org.
As the nation prepares to celebrate 250 years, C-SPAN is your front row seat for extensive coverage on our nation's journey.
Today at 11 a.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2.
a Revolutionary War reenactment at George Washington's Mount Vernon with a speech by General Washington.
I am not a Virginian, but an American.
Watch C-SPAN's America 250 coverage beginning this week on the C-SPAN networks and the C-SPAN Now app, our free mobile video app.
Also, scan the code or go online to c-span.org/slash America250 for programming and scheduling information.
America 250, exploring the American story, only on the C-SPAN Networks.
Mike said before, I happened to listen to him.
He was on C-SPAN 1.
▲
Export Selection