Feb. 21, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| We've got more President's Week in partnership with Learn Liberty for you today. | ||
| That's five shows in five days with five experts on five different presidents of the United States. | ||
| Joining me today is a professor of political philosophy at Clemson University, the executive director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, and the author of two books on John Adams. | ||
| C. Bradley Thompson, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hi, Dave, it's great to be here with you. | ||
| I've seen the studio many, many times, and it's great to finally be here. | ||
| Well, it's great to have you here. | ||
| Out of all of the professors that I'm talking to this week, you're the only one that I've met before and we've worked together before. | ||
| We did an event at Clemson, of course, with Jordan Peterson and Ankar Gait from the Ayn Rand Institute. | ||
| And just very briefly, before we dive into John Adams, when I left that weekend, and Jordan and I talked about it after, I just thought what you guys were doing there was spectacular. | ||
| The amount of young people talking about freedom, talking about capitalism, You took us to a little event in the afternoon with some of your top-tier students, and we sat around and just talked about ideas, and they had great questions. | ||
| So just very briefly, can you just kind of tell me about what you're doing there, and then we'll talk about that guy. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So I think in your interview with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro a couple of days ago, You mentioned an idea revolution, and I think that's precisely what we're trying to do at Clemson. | ||
| So, in addition to being a professor of political philosophy, I run the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. | ||
| And the Institute is America's first and only university-based teaching and research center dedicated to exploring the moral foundations of a free society. | ||
| And more recently, in the last three or four years, we've started a brand new program called the Lyceum Scholars Program. | ||
| And what it does is it offers a scholarship to incoming freshmen, and we use a great books approach to studying the history of liberty, capitalism, the American founding, and the principles of moral character. | ||
| And there's simply no program in the United States like this. | ||
| The students are required to take eight classes together as a cohort, one each semester, over their four years. | ||
| And we're trying to create a new kind of intellectual community, one that is based around big ideas, great books, and a genuine interest in the history and development of the idea of freedom. | ||
| Yeah, well, it was just very obvious to me and to Jordan that you guys were just doing great work. | ||
| I mean, just the questions we were asked, even I had a few hours in the afternoon, I was just wandering around campus and kids were coming up to me and asking me, you know, it's one thing they wanted to say hi, take a selfie, but they really wanted to talk about politics. | ||
| I was like, this is absolutely amazing. | ||
| So, so good work. | ||
| Well, thank you, and we have to have you back. | ||
| We'd love to have you back with Jordan and others. | ||
| And you also work with Brandon Turner, by the way, who's a former guest of the Rubin Report and also a great professor. | ||
| Yeah, Brandon is a member of the Clemson Institute and a good friend. | ||
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Great. | |
| All right, so let's talk John Adams. | ||
| So we're doing a lot of founders this week, not all founders, but the three really, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. | ||
| I think I actually know the least about John Adams out of the three. | ||
| So this is gonna be a little bit of a learning experience for me too. | ||
| You've written two books on John Adams. | ||
| So first off, the way I've started all these is just a little bit on the brief history just as a young person. | ||
| What do we need to know? | ||
| Well, before I start with Adams as a boy and a young man, let me just begin with a kind of controversial claim. | ||
| In my view, Adams is the most important, the most accomplished of all of America's founding fathers. | ||
| I think this can be demonstrated, it's provable, and hopefully over the course of the next hour or so, we'll find out. | ||
| So, and I think Adams was the revolution's greatest man of ideas, and I think he was the greatest man of action, and we'll talk about that over the course of our time. | ||
| Who was John Adams? | ||
| Born in 1735 in Braintree, Massachusetts, he was the son of a farmer and a shoemaker, so he came from very, very modest means. | ||
| He was raised in a Calvinist, Puritan culture. | ||
| He was homeschooled, essentially, until he was 16, first just in his parents' home, and then, I think starting maybe as an eight-year-old boy, he would go to a local Literally, a home school, right, where someone would take in four or five students and teach them in their home. | ||
| He went to Harvard when he was 16, and it was at Harvard, though, that you really see the flowering of a new person as a result of a kind of intellectual confrontation with the Enlightenment. | ||
| So, raised, as I said, in this Calvinist Puritan family and culture. | ||
| Gets to Harvard and he's introduced to the ideas of the Enlightenment more particularly. I would say he's | ||
| introduced to two books That that changes life. The first is Newton's Principia | ||
| Mathematica and the second is John Locke's essay concerning human understanding and | ||
| From Newton he learns that the universe is governed by by universal absolute | ||
| physical laws of nature from Locke he learns that | ||
| He learns the possibility of what we might call a the creation of a demonstrative or secular | ||
| science of ethics So, he combines these two ideas when he's at Harvard, and he starts to think seriously about developing a kind of naturalistic moral philosophy. | ||
| Right after he graduates from Harvard, he takes a job as a schoolmaster in a one-room schoolhouse in Worcester, Massachusetts. | ||
| And if you think about it, where is Worcester, Massachusetts in 1757? | ||
| in 1757. It is literally on the western frontier of civilization. | ||
| It's sort of hard to believe. | ||
| Yeah, of British civilization. | ||
| And so here he is in a village of maybe 500 people in a one-room schoolhouse for a couple of years teaching eight-year-old boys. | ||
| And there are great stories that he tells in his diary about his experience during that time. | ||
| And I have to say, I mean, It mirrors my own life. | ||
| I taught for two years at an all-boys boarding school, teaching young boys. | ||
| And I can tell you, you have to learn to grow up real fast trying to teach young boys much of anything. | ||
| And so it was during this time, during this two or three year period that he's in Worcester, Massachusetts, that John Adams, young John Adams, who's now say 21 years old, is really starting to think about who and what he is and wants to be. | ||
| So he begins a diary and in this diary he First, he confronts his Puritan background, and there are tortured passages where he's wrestling with the foundations of Calvinist theology. | ||
| And ultimately, during these years, he finally comes to reject Calvinist theology. | ||
| So, he rejects the idea of total depravity, original sin, on unconditional | ||
| Elections and and he really sort of embraces the idea that that you can | ||
| through primarily through reason through Introspection in one's observation of the world that you | ||
| can develop a moral philosophy I mean Adams was Adams was always religious beginning to | ||
| end but He really did think it was possible to develop what we | ||
| might call a secular science of ethics Yeah, that's really interesting. | ||
| Let's just pause there for a second because I think that's one of the themes that we talk about on this show a lot. | ||
| People of faith and not of faith. | ||
| who are constantly trying to figure out, well, where do morals come from? | ||
| And he remained a religious person, and also, I'm gonna read a specific quote to you in a little bit about his feelings on that, but then also did acknowledge the separation of church and state too, which is sort of, but although maybe not as specifically as perhaps Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, which is a really interesting little piece. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean through studying John Adams, and particularly studying him at this age, so when he's in his early 20s, I mean you really see, it's a kind of pivotal point in American history. | ||
| When Americans, colonial Americans, transition out of, particularly those in New England, when they transition out of their adherence to this Calvinist theology to becoming, you know, essentially a kind of Enlightenment nation. | ||
| And so, he's struggling with his religion, he's struggling with how to establish this kind of demonstrative science of ethics. | ||
| What he does, and this in part he gets from Locke and Newton, is the study of human nature. | ||
| And how do you study human nature? | ||
| Well, the first thing you do is you introspect. | ||
| You turn inward. | ||
| You look inward on yourself. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And you try to figure out who and what you are, and what your motives are when you act, and how it is and why it is that you get angry in certain situations, and the results, the effects that certain kinds of behaviors have on other people. | ||
| Then the second thing is you just look out into the world, right? | ||
| And you observe other people. | ||
| And so, for instance, in his diary he has passages where he, as a young man, where he describes a fight, a conjugal fight between his parents. | ||
| And it's clearly upsetting to him. | ||
| He goes upstairs to his bedroom and he sits down and then he writes out a long passage describing the passions that affected both of his parents and how one can overcome those passions. | ||
| And then the third vehicle by which you can study human nature, he says, is by studying history. | ||
| History is a kind of laboratory for studying human nature. | ||
| History is, in a sense for Adams, philosophy by example. | ||
| And so he slowly in the late 1750s develops this sort of moral philosophy | ||
| that is focused on his own individual development. | ||
| The primary virtue, what we might call the architectonic virtue is self-governance. | ||
| How do you govern yourself? | ||
| And he developed a series of virtues connected with self-governance, which is, | ||
| it's very interesting that he does this at that age. | ||
| He was 21 when he starts this. | ||
| And it's interesting in part because Benjamin Franklin, when he was the same age as Adams, decides that he wants to achieve moral perfection. | ||
| And you can read about this in Franklin's autobiography. | ||
| And if you think about it, I mean, this is extraordinary, and Adams was concerned with the same thing. | ||
| Moral perfection. | ||
| How do I become, if not morally perfect, the most virtuous kind of person that I can be, or one can be? | ||
| Franklin develops a, it's sort of like a pre-Jordan Peterson It's a 13-step program for moral perfection. | ||
| He establishes 13 virtues and he creates a chart by which one can practice each week one virtue. | ||
| It's literally a 13-step program to moral perfection. | ||
| John Adams does something very similar to that. | ||
| It's, I mean, people always ask me the question, how is it, why is it that we got this extraordinary generation of revolutionary leaders, right? | ||
| Adams, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton. | ||
| They were often very separate, I mean, geographically. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| They were all separate. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But it all, in the end, I think, I mean, the explanation for how and why we got this generation at one moment in time is the moral education that they all undertook when they were very young men. | ||
| And that was a big part of 18th century American culture. | ||
| The focus, the really intense focus, on one's own moral development. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because we could use probably a little more of that these days, but as you just referenced Jordan Peterson, I think that has a lot to do with all the reasons that he's catching fire these days, the way he is. | ||
| So I wanted to read this quote to you because I think it gets right to what you're talking about and the play that John Adams had with religion, which is so interesting to me. | ||
| This quote, he said, our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. | ||
| It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. | ||
| That almost sounds a little reverse of the way the rest of the founders might have viewed religion and government. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair estimation? | ||
| No, I think that probably would have been shared by most of the revolutionary generation. | ||
| Because it says immoral and religious people. | ||
| Now they were separating church and state, but I guess morality was tied so into religion at the time either way, although he was working on this way sort of to solve that problem. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think the view of the entire revolutionary generation is that you can't have a You can't have a free society made up of moral reprobates, right? | ||
| And so, for the founding generation, there must be a connection between moral virtue and a free society. | ||
| So, in many ways, I mean, they are, of course, best known to us by what they created politically, right? | ||
| By the Constitution and the Revolutionary State Constitutions. | ||
| But, in many ways, I think their greatest contribution, which we have entirely neglected in the late 20th and now in the early 21st century, is their understanding of morality, right? | ||
| Now, were all of them five-point Calvinists? | ||
| No, some were. | ||
| Were all of them atheists? | ||
| Well, even fewer were atheists. | ||
| Even Thomas Jefferson, who probably came the closest to not being religious, even Jefferson himself believed that most people needed religion of some kind. | ||
| We'll take Adams and Jefferson. | ||
| They had, I think, a kind of utilitarian view of religion. | ||
| So, how devout each was in their own personal life can be disputed. | ||
| But what can't be disputed, I think, is that they did think that religion could serve a useful purpose and function in society. | ||
| Not everybody. | ||
| can be a John Adams or a Thomas Jefferson, not everybody can be a philosopher. | ||
| And so I think ultimately in the end, what they did was they attempted | ||
| to reconcile philosophy and religion. | ||
| Yeah, so this seems to be a little bit of the macro micro argument on religion and morality. | ||
| So we've done this a couple times in this very studio, where I've had Dennis Prager and Michael Shermer on, where Michael comes from the point of that you can be completely moral without religion. | ||
| Dennis says that at the micro level, you right there can be, but at a societal level, on the macro level, that it doesn't quite work. | ||
| It sounds like there's a little bit of that idea in there. | ||
| No, I think that's right. | ||
| In terms of the Founding Fathers though, I think there's really no question that they thought that religion and philosophy would have to be reconciled in some kind of way. | ||
| Or to put it differently, that Athens and Jerusalem would have to be reconciled, reason and revelation. | ||
| Now, whether the philosopher actually thinks that, in fact, is true, is a completely different question. | ||
| So, can there be both moral virtue and freedom without religion? | ||
| Well, I think absolutely there can be. | ||
| But the question is, how do you convince 350 million other of your fellow citizens of that. | ||
| And how do you get them to actually be moral in their lives here now today without that crutch? | ||
| Now, I think there are ways. | ||
| Do you think, so is that right there? | ||
| Is that sort of the linchpin of everything else that John Adams believed? | ||
| Do you think that's sort of his most important post that he staked? | ||
| In hindsight, given the context of the world in which we live today, I think we have a lot to learn from Adams. | ||
| And, in fact, it's really just only been in the last couple of weeks that I've decided that I may, not certain yet, but I may be writing what I would call a moral biography of John Adams. | ||
| And the purpose of which is to introduce to 21st century Americans, particularly the kind of audience that Jordan Peterson is appealing to, introducing to them, at the very least, introducing to them the moral seriousness of this extraordinary generation of Americans. | ||
| There's a sense in which I think particularly in the context of the world in which we live today, politics is becoming increasingly irrelevant, if not, or secondary. | ||
| And if there's going to be, I mean, you've talked about an idea revolution. | ||
| And I think a big part of that idea revolution has to be a kind of moral revolution. | ||
| And, you know, as Andrew Breitbart famously said, I'll go even further, economics is downstream from politics, politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from ideas, and ideas are housed in the universities. | ||
| And if there's going to be an idea revolution, I think it has to begin with morality. | ||
| And we need a kind of... in an age of nihilism. | ||
| I do think we need a kind of moral revolution, and one way to get at it would be to go back to our founding fathers. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why I wanted to do so many of the founders in this first President's Week that we're doing, and obviously this particular topic fits within the sort of larger thing that we're doing here. | ||
| What else do we need to know about his sense of morality? | ||
| I mean, what did he really believe those tenets to be? | ||
| Well, I mean, he formulated it in different ways at different times, but I think one could probably sum up his moral view with three pillars. | ||
| Believe in God, be kind to other people, and govern yourself. | ||
| Adams really only focused on the third one, which is interesting. | ||
| If you read his diary, his autobiography, all of his political writings, and maybe even more importantly, if you read the advice that he gives to his own children, like, for instance, in letters to his son, John Quincy Adams, when John Quincy was a young boy, thirteen, When he's sending John Quincy Adams advice on how to become a young man, the focus, the emphasis, is almost entirely on how to govern oneself. | ||
| And how do you govern oneself? | ||
| For instance, what are the books that one can read? | ||
| Well, it's never the Bible. | ||
| It is Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero, Cicero is Deofeke, Seneca, and Epictetus. | ||
| So ancient Greek and Roman moral philosophers. | ||
| In other words, pre-Christian pagan moralists. | ||
| And yet he has this important religious piece attached to him in seemingly a more intimate way. | ||
| I guess that's what I'm trying to say. | ||
| It seems like he had it in a more personal way than some of the other founders did. | ||
| Yeah, well, certainly more than Jefferson. | ||
| That is, I think, that is true. | ||
| But probably more so, he certainly had a little, slightly more religion. | ||
| I mean, he almost, Adams was almost a deist. | ||
| He wasn't quite as much of a deist as Thomas Jefferson was. | ||
| But look, were there revolutionaries and Founding Fathers who were Calvinists? | ||
| Of course there were. | ||
| Were there Founding Fathers who were more religious, more devout than Adams was? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And so I would say on the spectrum of religious belief, Adams was I would say closer to Jefferson's position. | ||
| In the end, for Adams, Adams's Christianity came down to belief in the existence of God, the immortality of souls, that the soul is immortal, and that when we die, we will be rewarded or punished for our virtues or our sins. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| It's even questionable whether he believed in the divinity of Christ. | ||
| His religion, he went to church, unlike Jefferson. | ||
| He was a regular churchgoer. | ||
| But he really was very close to being a deist. | ||
| And this is the point to make. | ||
| There's a much greater emphasis in his moral writings, his moral teachings, on what I called earlier a kind of secular science of ethics. | ||
| Yeah, so you mentioned some of the things that he was reading. | ||
| What do we know about the contemporaries or some of the people ahead of him that he was learning from? | ||
| In terms of learning political philosophy and Harvard. | ||
| I would have also imagined that, unlike, say, James Madison, who came from a lot of money, coming from nothing, ending up at Harvard. | ||
| That must have been pretty unheard of, too, right? | ||
| Oh, absolutely, right? | ||
| And so, I mean, it is an interesting contrast between Adams, for instance. | ||
| So, if you look at the major founding fathers, and let's take Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. | ||
| All three from Virginia. | ||
| All three aristocrats. | ||
| All three slaveholders. | ||
| John Adams, by contrast, comes from very modest means. | ||
| His father was what we would call a yeoman farmer. | ||
| Lower, middle class farmer. | ||
| They lived very, very modest lives. | ||
| Adams, he did not have a lot. | ||
| He was recognized by his father at a very young age as being really quite brilliant. | ||
| Because John Adams was the oldest son, it was determined by the father that he would go to Harvard. | ||
| The father wanted him to be a minister. | ||
| And that was part of his struggle during his time at Harvard and after he graduated for those three years in Worcester, was, do I become a minister? | ||
| That was really what inspired him to start thinking seriously about his religious commitments. | ||
| And about a year into his teaching in Worcester, he decided, no, I'm not going to be a minister because Imagine what it's like to be a minister in 18th century Massachusetts. | ||
| You are going to be involved in theological disputes all the time. | ||
| And he witnessed those theological disputes and he said, that's not for me. | ||
| So he decided to become a lawyer. | ||
| Yeah, so he was a practicing lawyer. | ||
| It sounds like all the founders basically were lawyers at some level or another, and that was really the direct link to politics, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah, at that time. | ||
| And what's interesting, though, is that there were no law schools at that time, right? | ||
| So, to become a lawyer, you apprenticed. | ||
| You would apprentice with a lawyer, which Adams did. | ||
| He apprenticed with a lawyer first in Worcester, and then when he moved back to Braintree in Boston, he apprenticed. | ||
| And again, I mean, When reading his diary, I mean, Dave, it's extraordinary what this young man was like, and the kind of work ethic that was required to dedicate oneself, particularly coming from modest means, right? | ||
| So, unlike Jefferson, who really was, in many ways, I call him the Virginia Dauphin. | ||
| He was sort of the heir apparent. | ||
| He was raised mostly by women. | ||
| He was pampered and treated as though he really were an aristocrat. | ||
| Whereas Adams had to struggle for everything. | ||
| In his life and he had to work extraordinarily hard and His commitment to and and he's doing this right not at a law school right where if you remember the famous professor Kingsfield Yeah in The the great movie the paper chase, right? | ||
| There's no professor Kingsfield in his life there is there's just a kind of individual personal commitment And again, in his diary, I mean, he shares this. | ||
| He tells you how he does it. | ||
| And if I could just share with you this one extraordinary story about Adams that has always moved me and I share with my students all the time. | ||
| Adams was a young Adams, again, 21, 22-year-old Adams. | ||
| He was always fascinated with this ancient fable called The Choice of Hercules. | ||
| Which was first told in Xenophon's memorabilia, and then was captured on canvas in, I think, the 16th century by the painter Annibale Carracci. | ||
| And so, what is the choice of Hercules? | ||
| What is the painting, right? | ||
| The painting of Hercules sitting, and to his left is vice in the form of of a very attractive woman uh wearing a very sort of silky negligee kind of thing and there's a mask representing the theater and a bottle of wine and to his right there is a very sturdy modest uh modestly dressed woman who represents virtue and she's pointing upward | ||
| To a mountain and a road that criss-crosses up the mountain. | ||
| And for Adams, he was fascinated by the choice of Hercules. | ||
| And this kind of summed up the conflicts in his life. | ||
| And so, let me just reach over. | ||
| In his diary, and I'd like to share this with you and your audience. | ||
| Remember, 21 years old. | ||
| Writing in his diary, how many 21-year-olds would write this in their diary today. | ||
| He writes, let virtue address me. | ||
| Which dear youth will you prefer? | ||
| A life of effeminacy, indolence, and obscurity? | ||
| Or a life of industry, temperance, and honor? | ||
| Take my advice. | ||
| Let no trifling diversion or amusement or company decoy you from your books. | ||
| That is, let no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness decoy you from your books. | ||
| And then the very next passage, he lays out all of the great treatises of the law that he has to study. | ||
| And he's constantly imploring himself, examining the inner status of his soul, trying to purge himself of all laziness so that he can return to the books and become the best. | ||
| And he has a vision. | ||
| At a very young age, he has a vision of greatness. | ||
| In fact, he lays out, he establishes a hierarchy of greatness of different professions. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And at the peak, at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of greatness is... Talk show host. | ||
| That was number two. | ||
| That was number two. | ||
| Professor was number one. | ||
| No, Professor was not number one. | ||
| Professor didn't even make the list. | ||
| Uh oh. | ||
| No. | ||
| It was to be a lawgiver. | ||
| By which he meant a lawgiver in the tradition of the great classical Greek lawgivers, Lycurgus of Sparta and Solon of Athens. | ||
| And what did Lycurgus and Solon do? | ||
| They were constitution makers. | ||
| They designed the constitutions for Sparta And for Athens. | ||
| And so Adams, around 1759, 1760, decides that he wants to be a lawgiver, a constitution maker. | ||
| And if you think about it, in the context of what will come almost 20 years later, it's prophetic. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he really gave himself a roadmap for this thing. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Yeah, so the passage that you just read and much of what you're referencing here, this was all in his biography? | ||
| So he was just writing this to himself, really? | ||
| Yeah, in his diary. | ||
| Of course not his biography, his diary. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So at the time, he didn't even know that this was, I mean, I guess they all sort of knew it was going to be public at some level, if things went well, right? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| No, I don't think he was thinking at 21 that this will be public, I'll be great. | ||
| I mean I think he was honestly, genuinely confronting the biggest questions of his life | ||
| at that time. | ||
| And I think he was entirely genuine and he was using the diary as a vehicle for self-improvement. | ||
| Do we know what some of the other guys like Jefferson and Madison thought of him because | ||
| he came from such a different place? | ||
| I mean, there probably was a little envy there, perhaps, or a little dismissiveness of the type of person that he was just because of his roots. | ||
| Yeah, although it was never expressed quite in those terms. | ||
| So, were many envious of him? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Did many of them denounce him? | ||
| Unquestionably. | ||
| What is, I think, most interesting, and I think maybe we can get into this later because it's connected to his later political thought, which he developed 20-25 years later, is, and the irony of this is stinging, he was accused For instance, by Thomas Jefferson, of being an advocate of aristocracy and monarchy, of being a crypto-monarchist, of being an apostate or a heretic, terms Jefferson used in describing Adams, of the Republican cause. | ||
| Now, I mean, this is, of course, fundamentally, well, it's absurd and it's dishonest. | ||
| What was the basis for the accusation? | ||
| Well, the basis came out of things that were misinterpreted that Adams had written in the late 1780s. | ||
| Adams wrote a great treatise called The Defense of the Constitutions of the United States of America, in which, if read in a very shallow way, and without really reading what Adams is actually saying, | ||
| one, well, let's just say some misinterpreted what he wrote and claimed that he was arguing for these things, | ||
| which he absolutely was not. | ||
| All right, so I think we've set a pretty good table here in terms of the sort of battle he had | ||
| between internal morality and religion and how he combined these things | ||
| and the people that were around him and his background and all that. | ||
| As we enter sort of the revolutionary period here, he was one of the first people | ||
| that wanted independence from Britain, right? | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| And was that just, [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| He wanted personal freedom, so he wanted freedom from the old world. | ||
| Yeah, so he was, I mean, I think in part he was always looking for a launching pad to The launching pad to greatness, in a sense. | ||
| And that came in 1765 with the passage of the Stamp Act, the famous Stamp Act. | ||
| And he wrote his first major treatise in 1765. | ||
| It was called A Dissertation on the Canon in Feudal Law. | ||
| And it was first a critique of the Stamp Act. | ||
| Can you just lay out what the Stamp Act was? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| The Stamp Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1765, and what it did was it put a tax, a first-time-ever tax on Anglo-American colonials on the use of papers. | ||
| So all paper, particularly paper that was used in legal transactions, had to be crown | ||
| stamped, so a stamped paper. | ||
| And what was, from the American perspective, what was unjust about this tax was that they | ||
| had never been taxed by Great Britain before. | ||
| Britain had various commercial regulations where they had duties on goods imported into the colonies, but never a tax for the purpose of raising a revenue for the British Treasury. | ||
| So this was truly the first example of no taxation without representation, right? | ||
| Yeah, no, absolutely, right? | ||
| And that was the rallying cry that went up and down the Atlantic seaboard. | ||
| No taxation I can't imagine that he had much pushback against that from his friends and compatriots, right? | ||
| Everyone must have been against it. | ||
| Well, for the most part. | ||
| For the most part, almost all Americans recognized the injustice of the Stamp Act. | ||
| But what happened was, the following year, the British Parliament, because of the reaction in America, | ||
| which was immediate, it was visceral, and occasionally it was violent. | ||
| So there were protests up and down the Atlantic seaboard from Boston to Charleston. | ||
| So the following year they rescinded the Stamp Act, but passed a new act called the Declaratory Act. | ||
| Which declared that Parliament's laws were supreme in all cases whatsoever. | ||
| And what that meant was that Parliament was now declaring that they were supreme, their authority, their power was supreme over the 13 colonial legislatures. | ||
| And so, in many ways, of all the acts passed by the British Parliament during this period that we call the Imperial Crisis, from 1765 to 1776, which would include, in addition to the Stamp Act, the Townsend Acts, the Tea Act, the Coercive Acts, in many ways the Declaratory Act was the one that concerned the Americans the most, because it essentially took away their freedom of self-government. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the Americans over the course of the previous 50 years had really developed, even though they were loyal subjects of the British Crown, they had really developed a kind of independence from Great Britain. | ||
| They were governing themselves. | ||
| And during that period, up until 1765, during the period of what they call salutary neglect, Britain took a very laissez-faire attitude toward the American colonies, which allowed them to develop all these self-governing institutions and traditions. | ||
| And so that's why when the Stamp Act came, it set off a firestorm in the colonies. | ||
| And then, beginning with Adams' dissertation on the canon of feudal law, which in the end was not only a critique of the Stamp Act, but I would say even more importantly, it was a defense of American liberty. | ||
| Adams introduces the idea of what he called the spirit of liberty, which he was trying to | ||
| to reignite in the American people and the spirit of liberty is a combination of having certain ideas of right | ||
| and Just but also combining it with a kind of passion a love of | ||
| freedom. And so Adams was very explicitly reigniting this spirit of liberty and from that moment | ||
| forward you can trace his trajectory right to right to the revolution | ||
| Yeah, let's go. | ||
| Let me let's go to the revolution take take me on that voyage. | ||
| Yeah, so For the rest of the 1760s, Adams, with every passing year, becomes increasingly more involved in the local Massachusetts, more particularly Boston, revolutionary movement. | ||
| So he gets elected to the Massachusetts legislature in, I think, 1770. | ||
| He's writing all kinds of pamphlets defending American freedom and attacking the idea of parliamentary sovereignty. | ||
| Was it dangerous to do things like that at the time? | ||
| I mean, like, physically dangerous? | ||
| I mean, I know it was obviously controversial, I'm sure there were people that didn't like him, but you sort of think about it in our times now, if you were passing out some really anti-government stuff, like, you know? | ||
| Yeah, not then. | ||
| it would become dangerous. By 1775, it then very much becomes dangerous and absolutely in 1776. | ||
| But in the 1760s, no, it's not dangerous. But it would, for instance, get in the way of one's | ||
| professional and personal development. So, for instance, in 1769, Adams is offered the position | ||
| of Advocate General in the Courts of Admiralty, which during any other period of colonial American | ||
| history would have been an extraordinary boon to a young man of extraordinarily modest means. | ||
| I mean, this was to reach the pinnacle of British imperial government in the colonies. | ||
| But he refused. | ||
| And he refused, he said, because he could not and would not sanction policies that were against the freedoms of what he called his country. | ||
| And then a year later, after the Boston Massacre, and once again sort of against, maybe against his immediate interest, he defends the British soldiers. | ||
| In a court of law, against murder charges. | ||
| And he successfully defends them. | ||
| And he defends them, and at the same time he's doing this, his own fellow patriots are denouncing him for defending British soldiers who were involved in the Boston Massacre. | ||
| But Adams said that in a free country, every man deserves justice. | ||
| Yeah, he must have gotten an incredible amount of hate for that. | ||
| He got a fair amount of hate for that, right? | ||
| So, those two stories, I think, are early indications of Adams' moral integrity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Adams was a man of extraordinary moral and political integrity. | ||
| He had principles, principles that he believed in, but more importantly, principles that he lived his life by. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so for Adams, and this is an important point. | ||
| For Adams, one's self-interest was not necessarily one's, say, financial gain or improvement. | ||
| One's self-interest was in protecting one's moral character. | ||
| And so Adams, unlike almost all the other founding fathers, always put himself in a position where, I mean, he was risking, he was risking fortune, reputation, but he always did it because he believed the cause was true and right. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine as he was defending the British soldiers that he probably thought, man, I'll probably never get into politics after this. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And he did take a lot of heat from some of the local patriots, but he was so committed to the cause. | ||
| And then in 1774-75, he wrote what I think is still to this day the most important, certainly I think the most brilliant, revolutionary tract that was published. | ||
| The title is The Novanglis Letters. | ||
| And Adams, at a very high theoretical level, took up the biggest questions, the biggest constitutional questions that existed. | ||
| Because the battle between Great Britain and the colonies at that time was primarily a constitutional question, right? | ||
| And it came down to one question. | ||
| What is the extent of Parliament's authority in the American colonies. | ||
| And Adams, in the Novangelist letters, develops an incredibly sophisticated legal argument, arguing that Parliament has no authority in the colonies whatsoever. | ||
| None. | ||
| And, in fact, argues that The colony's only connection to Great Britain was, and this is very interesting and ironic, through the person of the king. | ||
| That is to say, Parliament has no authority, they can make no laws for us. | ||
| Our only attachment to Great Britain is really through our charters. | ||
| Charters that have been granted by English kings in the 17th century. | ||
| And these charters are, in effect, for Adams, they are proto-constitutions. | ||
| And these charters define for Adams the constitutional relationship between Great Britain and the colonies. | ||
| So these charters, these were the original rules that they were governed by? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But in effect, he was going to get rid of them. | ||
| I mean, they were all going to get rid of them anyway, right? | ||
| That was the plan. | ||
| By that time, that's right. | ||
| I think that was close to being the plan. | ||
| Oh, I see what you're saying. | ||
| So he basically was saying, yeah, That old stuff, those charters, but that's it. | ||
| No, that's exactly right. | ||
| But eventually, Adams scraps the charters. | ||
| And by the way, I mean, just very quickly, let me say that these charters are, I mean, | ||
| these are legal documents, English legal documents. | ||
| But what Adams does, and this is the most philosophically interesting part of the Novangelist | ||
| Letters, he reinterprets them to be Lockean social contracts. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They're less legal documents than they're philosophic documents. | ||
| They are grounded in individuals coming together in communal association and through consent | ||
| agreeing to establish first communities and then a Lockean social compact with the king. | ||
| But these charters, by Adams's interpretation, give the colonists full self-governing authority | ||
| in the colonies. | ||
| So anyway, I think it's the most important tract of the revolutionary period. | ||
| Do we know after that how much actual editing or writing he did directly on the Constitution | ||
|
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or the Bill of Rights? | |
| Yes. | ||
| So, zero, technically. | ||
| With Thomas Jefferson, he was not at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. | ||
| Where was he? | ||
| He was in Europe. | ||
| He was ambassador to Great Britain at the time, and Jefferson was ambassador to France at the time. | ||
| Adams' ideas, however, had a massive influence on the drafting of the Federal Constitution. | ||
| So, in 1776, Adams wrote, this is before July 4th, so before independence, Adams is the leading advocate in the Continental Congress for the colonies to draft constitutions and create new governments, which was | ||
| in effect a de facto declaration of independence. | ||
| And to that end, he drafted a document, or a pamphlet, called Thoughts on Government. | ||
| And it's a kind of proto-constitution. | ||
| And it was, in many ways, other than Tom Paine's Common Sense, | ||
| it was the most influential pamphlet written during, I think, the Revolutionary Period, | ||
| because it influenced the drafting of revolutionary state constitutions in four states. | ||
| And then in 1780, Adams himself is the author of the most important, the most developed, and the most influential Revolutionary State Constitution, which was the Massachusetts Constitution, which then had a direct influence, both in form and substance, for the Federal Constitution of 1787. | ||
| So, after the Revolution, he then becomes the first Vice President? | ||
| Am I missing anything between there? | ||
| Did I jump over something? | ||
| You looked at me, you briefly like, "Ah, Dave, you missed some stuff." | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's still a lot. | ||
| So I'll pick up just before July 4th, 1776. | ||
| Adams has been now in the Second Continental Congress for two years. | ||
| He's moved away from Abigail, his wife, and their four young children. | ||
| He's moved to Philadelphia, and I think it is absolutely the case that Adams was, he was the engine, the workhorse of the revolutionary movement between 1774 and 1776. | ||
| He served on some 90 committees during that time. | ||
| He lived very modestly in a boarding house, working 12, 14 hours a day, six days a week. | ||
| But the great moment, and in many ways, Adams' greatest contribution to the American Revolution, | ||
| which has gone entirely neglected by historians, is... | ||
| The great moment of independence is not July 4th. | ||
| It's actually July 1st. | ||
| Because that was the day when arguments were going to be taken up in the Continental Congress for or against independence. | ||
| And John Dickinson, who was from Delaware and who himself had been one of the intellectual leaders of the revolutionary movement up until that point, stood up and gave a three-hour speech against independence. | ||
| Dickinson was a kind of moderate or cautious revolutionary, you might say. | ||
| After he sat down, the room fell silent. | ||
| And everybody sort of very nervously looked around the room. | ||
| Who would be the person to stand up? | ||
| and argue for independence, because the person who stood up to argue for independence would be, of course, reported to Georgia Third as the man who's making the argument for independence. | ||
| Let's pause for just a second. | ||
| What was Dickinson's argument, basically, that just we shouldn't do this now? | ||
| Because he was a revolutionary? | ||
| It's not like he would have wanted freedom, right? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| He was a reconciliationist. | ||
| He thought that patriot revolutionaries like John Adams and his cousin Samuel Adams were pushing too hard, too fast, and that there was still time for reconciliation. | ||
| uh... and but uh... the adams cousins uh... and thomas jefferson as well and george washington interestingly enough uh... they they believed uh... but then this is particularly now in the light of conquered in lexington right conquer the lexington had been had taken place in and in april of seventeen seventy five the year before armed conflict had already begun In the colonies, in Massachusetts in particular, we'd already had the Battle of Bunker Hill and all that stuff, so bloodshed had already happened. | ||
| So at this point, for Adams, the Rubicon had been crossed. | ||
| certainly with the battles in Massachusetts. The Rubicon was passed and he was full steam ahead for independence. | ||
| So, in the Congress meeting in Philadelphia, you know, everybody's very nervously looking around the room, right? | ||
| Who in a-- | ||
| Who is going to be the man to stand up and essentially be committing treason? | ||
| Because if this doesn't go your way, you're essentially signing your own death warrant at a certain level. | ||
| That's certainly your political life and probably your real life. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's exactly right. | ||
| But then all eyes eventually turned on the one man who they knew would stand up. | ||
| The one man who had the integrity, the honor, and the courage. | ||
| And of course it was John Adams. | ||
| And John Adams stood up and he gave this kind of fiery argument for independence. | ||
| Spoke for I think an hour and a half. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson described this speech as having, he said, quote, moved us from our seats, and he described Adams as the colossus of Independence. | ||
| Another delegate who was there and witnessed Adams' speech described Adams as the atlas of independence. | ||
| And so I think in many ways, well, in fact, not in many ways, I'll just say it. | ||
| I think this is the greatest speech in American history. | ||
| It's the most consequential speech in American history. | ||
| Now I see why you didn't want me to skip right over to VP. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And then the next day, the Congress votes for independence. | ||
| So Adams, and then during this whole period from let's say '75 to '77, now post-independence, | ||
| Adams was a workaholic. | ||
| And as I said, he served on 90 committees. | ||
| Most importantly, he was the president of the Board of War and Ordinance, which means that he logistically ran the war. | ||
| So his job was to supply Washington's army with supplies. | ||
| And it was more than a full-time job. | ||
| During that time, and by the way, it was John Adams who nominated George Washington to be commander of the American forces. | ||
| During this time, Adams also developed what was known as the Model Treaty, which became The most influential treaty or model of a treaty almost throughout all of American history because it argued that America should never have what it called entangling alliances. | ||
| So Adams was, I mean, he was the most active and principled revolutionary during this time. | ||
| And you have to also keep in mind, and this really is extraordinary, he's living apart | ||
| from his wife and young family. | ||
| He was away from them for almost two years. | ||
| He rode by horseback, round trip from Boston to Philadelphia, almost always in the dead | ||
| of winter, a two-week trip, five times during this period. | ||
| So, I mean, he really was the work engine of the Revolution. | ||
| And then, now, fast-forward to the late 1770s. | ||
| He was appointed by the Continental Congress as a Minister of Planet Potentiary to go to Europe and help try and get France to ally with these now rebel Americans. | ||
| That couldn't have been a fun job. | ||
| Well, it's extraordinary. | ||
| I mean, the stories that I'm about to share with you are literally unbelievable. | ||
| And it tells you everything you need to know about the man, John Adams. | ||
| First goes to France in 1778. | ||
| The ship that he took, and he went with his son John Quincy Adams, he took him, and the ship's main mast was struck by a lightning bolt, destroyed the main mast, and the ship could barely sail. | ||
| They were attacked by the British Navy. | ||
| Adams, who was the most distinguished, I mean, he was the prized possession on the ship, | ||
| that it was the responsibility of the captain to make sure he got Adams to France. | ||
| Adams insisted on going above deck and fighting. | ||
| And, you know, literally, cannonballs, and we have a record of this, cannonballs were whizzing over Adams' head, and the captain told him, go below deck, and Adams refused. | ||
| He said, if other men are going to fight and die for the cause, so will I. Wow. | ||
| So he goes to France, he's only there for six months as recalled, comes back, And then is told now that he has to go to France again, one more time. | ||
| And by the way, you have to remember, he's doing a North Atlantic crossing in these leaky, rickety old ships. | ||
| The second trip to France, and this is really extraordinary. | ||
| He decides now he's going to take two of his sons, John Quincy, who's 12, and Charles, who is 8. | ||
| Three days outside of Boston, the ship is in a major storm, a three-day storm. | ||
| It springs a leak. | ||
| All hands on deck have to pump water for two weeks. | ||
| And this is in the middle of a war. | ||
| And Britain has the largest, most powerful navy in the world. | ||
| So they have to sail basically through the British blockade. | ||
| The ship was supposed to sail to Bordeaux, France. | ||
| It can't make it to Bordeaux. | ||
| So it goes to the northwestern corner of Spain, El Ferrol, Spain, where Adams and his two sons disembark. | ||
| Adams now has a choice. | ||
| He can wait a month for the ship to be repaired to sail to Bordeaux, or John Adams and his 12-year-old and 8-year-old sons decide that they're going to take the overland route. | ||
| And so Adams and his two boys set off on donkeys. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| And ride from west to east across northern Spain. | ||
| They then, and along the way, they're staying in Spanish boarding houses. | ||
| Can you imagine what a Spanish boarding house in northern Spain in the 18th century would be like? | ||
| Adams describes it. | ||
| They had fireplaces with no chimneys, and all the animals slept in the houses, so it's extraordinary. | ||
| At one point, they have to cross the Pyrenees in the middle of the winter. | ||
| John Quincy Adams in the diary says that at one point, going over the mountains on donkeys, we were perpendicular, right? | ||
| They eventually get over the Pyrenees Mountains, and again, I mean, Imagine. | ||
| An 8-year-old and a 12-year-old. | ||
| An 8-year-old and a 12-year-old riding donkeys across the Pyrenees Mountains in the middle of the winter. | ||
| They come over and they get into France. | ||
| They get into a little village called Saint-Jean-de-Luz and from there they take a coach and four, as it was called, to Paris. | ||
| A thousand mile trip. | ||
| How long did this whole thing take? | ||
| It took I think it took them a month. | ||
| So basically he could have waited, oh I guess waited a month for repairs and then still had to sell, got there the day before or something? | ||
| Yeah, it might have been two months, I don't remember now. | ||
| But I mean, it's an extraordinary story and it demonstrates Adams' commitment to the revolutionary cause, right? | ||
| And it tells us something about his moral character, right? | ||
| That he was willing to do just about anything and everything for the sake of the American Revolution. | ||
| So, he gets to Paris, and Adams was not the most diplomatic of America's revolutionary diplomats. | ||
| By contrast, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were the epitome of diplomacy as defined by the French. | ||
| But Yankee John, who was honest to a fault, he couldn't play the diplomatic game. | ||
| Is Thomas Jefferson the ambassador at this time? | ||
| No, Jefferson is not quite yet in France. | ||
| Jefferson will come a few years later. | ||
| But Franklin was there. | ||
| So Adams was not a great success at the court of Louis XVI. | ||
| So, he decided he would leave France and instead go to the Netherlands, where he conducted what he called militia diplomacy. | ||
| And he spent the first year trying to get the Dutch bankers to commit to funding the American Revolution, which he was successful at doing. | ||
| And then he finally got the Dutch government to recognize the American Revolution. | ||
| And during that, I think, two, three year period that he was in Holland, I mean, he was a workaholic. | ||
| I mean, he's working now seven days a week. | ||
| He's working 16 hour days. | ||
| He actually got malaria and was deathly ill during his time there. | ||
| But it was his performance uh... as a as a european diplomat despite the fact that he broke all the rules of diplomacy despite the fact that he you know that he was not a let's call it uh... and a manicured diplomat uh... and he got the bottom line is he got the job done and then he is appointed uh... to be the first ambassador to the court of saint james in britain so he goes he goes to britain and | ||
| I think 1785, where he serves as America's ambassador to Britain. | ||
| And if I could, one more quick story, which again, I'm trying to... | ||
| share with you and your audience the extraordinary character of this man. Yeah, well that's, | ||
| I like that we're getting a sense of the real, real person here, not just the political | ||
| philosophy. Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, in 1780, in 1784-85, | ||
| he'd already made several North Sea crossings in the winter, which is a brutal crossing to have to make. | ||
| uh... and He has to go back one last time to secure more loans from Dutch bankers. | ||
| He boards ship, he's deathly ill, but he does it. | ||
| And again, a day out of port, the ship hits a massive storm and the ship gets close to Holland but is effectively shipwrecked on a deserted Dutch island. | ||
| And Adams and his crew, they get out on this island. | ||
| They trekked. | ||
| And Adams is now, I mean, you know, he's close to 50. | ||
| And they had to trek, break snow, knee-deep snow, for eight miles. | ||
| To get to a small village where they got a cart which took them to the far end of the island. | ||
| They get to the far end of the island, then they have to rent ice boats because the channel between the island and the mainland is filled with ice. | ||
| And these ice boats have runners on the bottom of them, right? | ||
| So they row where there's water until they get to ice, right? | ||
| And then somebody has to get out, pull the boat up onto the ice, then they have to walk across ice And then they get to water again, then they have to get back in the boat, the boat goes back into the water, and then they have to repeat this, you know, let's say five times, ten times over. | ||
| But again, that kind of story, I think, demonstrates the man. | ||
| And you have to understand the man in contrast to, say, other revolutionaries. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson, for instance, essentially sat out the war. | ||
| After he wrote the Declaration of Independence, he left Philadelphia and basically lived at Monticello for the rest of the war. | ||
| He was governor of Virginia for a couple of years, but that was it. | ||
| So, sat out the war. | ||
| Whereas Adams was, with the exception, I guess, of George Washington, was more intimately involved in the everyday workings of the revolution than any other American revolutionary at the time. | ||
| Yeah, that's incredible. | ||
| So, was he basically a no-brainer when Washington was deciding who his VP was? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't unanimous, and when the vote was made... Oh, right, because at the time, it wasn't just George Washington that selected his VP. | ||
| There were votes through the... Yeah, that's right. | ||
| But it was... I mean, it was clear that the only person who was going to be president, the first president of the United States, was going to be George Washington. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| And the only question was going to be who was the vice president. | ||
|
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And... | |
| Adams got the second largest number of votes, which made him, so they had a different voting system then, so he became the Vice President. | ||
| And of course it was a balance between a Virginian and somebody from New England. | ||
| And it was an extraordinary cabinet that Washington selected because he made Jefferson Secretary of State and Alexander Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, just powerhouses. | ||
| It was. | ||
| It's just hard to believe that, you know, with government now, it's just hard to believe that there was so much there. | ||
| Final thought, I mean, just give me something on his actual presidency that we should know, because it seems like so much of it and so much of what you write about is pre-presidency. | ||
| Is there anything major that we need to know about the presidency? | ||
| Yeah, so Adams was only president for one term. | ||
| I think the first thing to note is that it was not, It was a term with a lot of problems. | ||
| And the biggest problem was that he was surrounded by enemies in his own administration. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| You follow George Washington, right? | ||
| Who follows George Washington? | ||
| Who probably was at the height of his popularity because he had given up power of the military. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So people must have, he was beyond canonized. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But what happened was, America, essentially, throughout the 1790s, early to mid-1790s, divided. | ||
| It divided along party lines. | ||
| And there were two parties. | ||
| There were the Democratic-Republicans, the titular head of which was Thomas Jefferson, and there was the Federalist Party. | ||
| And Alexander Hamilton was effectively the leader of the Federalist Party. | ||
| John Adams saw himself as being a man above party. | ||
| But the problem was his administration was full of the leaders of the two parties. | ||
| So Thomas Jefferson was his vice president and then Hamilton's followers were in his | ||
| cabinet. | ||
| So he was constantly being torn apart by these two competing wings. | ||
| Now the big crisis that took place in the 1790s was effectively a foreign policy crisis. | ||
| So by the time Adams became president, France had begun what came to be called a quasi-war | ||
| against the United States. | ||
| And because the United States had in the 1790s signed a treaty, the Jay Treaty, with Great | ||
| Britain and had And I'm going to go ahead and close out the meeting. | ||
| reestablished commercial relations. | ||
| So what happened was, and now you have a revolutionary government in France, and this revolutionary | ||
| government unleashed its navy on American commercial trading. | ||
| And so they were attacking American ships. | ||
| And so it was a foreign policy crisis. | ||
| And so Adams had to navigate this crisis. | ||
| And the Federalists in his administration wanted him to go to war with France. | ||
| Jefferson and his followers wanted him to not go to war with France, and he was caught in the middle. | ||
| And eventually, long story short, he developed a foreign policy that wouldn't refuse to listen to either party, and he eventually established a treaty with France, which ended the Quasi-War. | ||
| But I think your viewers are going to want to ask me about the Alien and Sedition Acts. | ||
| So the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed at the end of Adams' administration. | ||
| Of course, Adams has been pilloried. | ||
| He was at the time, and he's been pilloried throughout American history up to this day because of the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, particularly the Sedition Act. | ||
| But you have to understand. | ||
| To understand why Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Act, you have to understand... Just very quickly, what was the Alien and Sedition Act? | ||
| Yeah, so the Alien Act, part of it, extended the period of naturalization for foreigners from, I think, say, three years to 14 or 16 years, but it also gave the government the power and the authority to deport Subversives in the United States. | ||
| The Sedition Act gave the federal government the authority to arrest people, usually newspaper editors, who were committing seditious libel against the government. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| This is the dangerous one. | ||
| Well, it is the dangerous one, but you have to really understand it. | ||
| You have to put it in context, which is the context of the time. | ||
| The first thing to note is that the Alien and Sedition Act was a war measure because the United States was in a quasi-war. | ||
| And you also have to understand at this time that the United States, Philadelphia in particular where the government was at the time, Philadelphia was a city that was full of French revolutionaries who were arguing for revolution in the United States, along the same lines as the French Revolution, which was in the middle of the terror, which was in the middle of committing genocide in France. | ||
| And at one point, there was a protest A violent protest in Philadelphia, which at the time would have been a small city of 25,000-50,000 people. | ||
| It is estimated there was a demonstration of 10,000 people in Philadelphia supporting the French Revolution, which went to John Adams' house. | ||
| Adams had to have armed guards protecting him from these revolutionaries. | ||
| That's the context. | ||
| So it was a war measure with a sunset clause. | ||
| It was only to go into effect for two years. | ||
| So that's the first thing. | ||
| The second thing, which most people don't understand, is that the Sedition Act was actually a liberalization of current sedition law. | ||
| So in sedition law of the time, truth was not permitted as a defense. | ||
| But the new Sedition Act Allowed for truth. So in fact, it actually liberalized. | ||
| Yeah, that's sedition law it improved it and | ||
| The other thing to mention just very quickly that Adam is that Adams it would one it was not Adams's idea | ||
| This was the creature of the high federalists in Congress It was a law created by Congress Adams never never | ||
| supported it in theory or in practice eventually Yes, he did sign it and that was his great mistake without | ||
| question But he was never a supporter of it. | ||
| The last thing to say, Thomas Jefferson, who attacked Adams for the Sedition Acts, it should be noted, did not oppose the Sedition Act on free speech grounds. | ||
| He opposed the Sedition Act because it was passed by the federal government. | ||
| Jefferson was 100% okay with Sedition Acts, Sedition laws at the state level. | ||
| And in fact, when he was president, he sent a note to the governor of Pennsylvania demanding | ||
| that the governor use state Sedition laws to silence anti-Jeffersonian editors in Pennsylvania. | ||
| It shows how they all had these sort of conflicting and complex beliefs that sometimes were conflicting and complex to their own selves. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So it's a little more complex than we think about it today. | ||
| And judged by the standards of the time, it's more understandable, judged by our standards today, and certainly you and I, as advocates of free speech, look at horror at the sedition laws. | ||
| Yeah, wow, wow. | ||
| I mean, there's so much here, and I really love that we did this sort of, this has been a little bit different than some of the other ones we've done, because we really went at the man and not just the ideas. | ||
| So I really enjoyed this chat, and I suspect we will perhaps do this again in Clemson in the not-too-distant future. | ||
| I'd look forward to it. | ||
| Perhaps, we shall see. |
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