While I see radical elements in the American Founding, I mostly see ways in which the Founding was conserving the best of the classical, medieval, and English past. The American Revolution, as such, did not turn the world upside down, but rather turned the world rightside back.
This is part two of a series. See the first essay in the series here. -Editor
Third, my major argument and most fundamental disagreement with Deneen comes from his interpretation of the American Founding as a liberal event, arguably the most important liberal event of recent ages. Here, I think, we can consider Harry Jaffa’s point from the early 1970s that how we understand the American Revolution is how we understand not just conservatism, but America.
From my perspective—having written extensively on the founding and having had the grand privilege of teaching the history of the American Revolution every fourth semester over the past 28 years at Hillsdale—the American Revolution is deeply radical and deeply conservative, but it is rarely liberal. Yes, to be sure, Locke played a role in the Founding, a huge role. Yet that role had limits. It must be remembered, that about 99% of white colonists were not just Protestant, but, as Burke noted sagaciously, the most Protestant of Protestants. As such, they simply dismissed the part of Locke that dismissed original sin and claimed a Tabula Rasa. Their Locke was a quasi-Anglican Locke—anti-Catholic, to be sure—the Locke of natural rights and of usurpations and a long train of abuses. Between February 1761 and July 4, 1776, as the crowning work of the extraordinary Don Lutz demonstrated, Locke was one of the single most cited figures in the founding. Only St. Paul topped him (but, importantly, he topped Locke by a huge amount), but after July 4, 1776, Locke is mentioned only very, very infrequently. The Locke that inspired the Declaration had absolutely nothing to offer for the creation of a legitimate government, either by the Articles of Confederation or the 1787 Federal Constitution. His rise was meteoric, but so was his fall.
To prove his point that the Founding was a manifestation of liberalism, Deneen relies almost exclusively on the arguments presented by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay as Publius in the Federalist Papers. Deneen refers to Federalist 10 repeatedly. Knowing Deneen personally as an ally and friend, I can assert here with some confidence that Patrick would’ve been very much at home in 1787 and 1788 as a leading Anti-Federalist. Though I believe I would’ve been a modern Federalist at the time, along the lines of a Charles Carroll of Carrollton, I, too, am deeply sympathetic to much that the Anti-Federalists argued. And, of course, many of their fears—such as a metastasized federal government and a failed system of checks and balances and an authoritarian executive—have all proven true.
Yet, I don’t believe that Deneen’s characterization of the Founding as liberal is accurate. Again, let me state, though, admittedly, I might very well have read too much John Adams, Edmund Burke, and Russell Kirk for my own good, the Founding was as deeply radical as it was deeply conservative.
Let’s take several examples showing just how conservative was.
First, the idea that America was some Enlightenment project is demonstrably false. In America, frankly, there were only four great Enlightenment figures—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush. To be sure, these were incredibly influential and powerful figures at the time. But, they remained a distinct minority. The average American colonist was not a disciple of the Enlightenment, but a devout Reformational Protestant. We often forget that while the Germans had experienced their Reformation in the fifteenth century, the English were still experiencing their Reformation—and their civil war resulting from it—at exactly the same time as colonial settlement. Not surprisingly, the Puritans fled to New England to escape the Anglicans, and the Anglicans settled Virginia to escape the Puritans. These two peoples, each fundamentally Reformational, hated the other. They were concerned with scripture not Enlightenment.
The one Enlightenment that did affect the Americans—that of the Celts, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke—was, by far, the most conservative of the various Enlightenments. The French was totalitarian, the English utilitarian, and the Celtic conservative. Much of the Celtic Enlightenment was transmitted to the colonies through John Witherspoon and Princeton, one of the nine colleges in colonial America.
Second, the American colonials were also deeply classical. Everywhere the Calvinists went, they took with them their Geneva Bible, Calvin’s Institutes, and Plato and Cicero. All education (no exaggeration), even if someone was educated only from ages 7-10, was classical education. School masters spent the day doing nothing but drilling in Greek and Latin. This proved so valuable that when Americans and French fought beside one another during the Revolution, they communicated through Latin, their only common language. Additionally, if one went to one of the nine colleges in the colonies, usually at ages 14-17, he learned the classics. The entrance requirements for the nine colleges: translating the first several books of St. John’s Gospel from Greek to Latin, as well as translating three of Cicero’s orations as well as the first 1,500 lines of Virgil’s Aeneid from Latin to English.
Not surprisingly, then, the Federalist authors took the name Publius, we named our upper legislative body the Senate, our Capitol Building is a second century BC Roman building, and the House of Representatives uses the fasces as its symbol. We are a deeply classical people, but rooted far more in Rome than in Greece. The founding generation adored Tacitus, Livy, Virgil, and, above all, Cicero and Cincinatus.
Third, the Declaration of Independence is, at once, radical and conservative. Look at its foundational claims, rooted in laws of nature and Nature’s God. The language and intent is Stoic in the first paragraph by Jefferson, but baptized as Christian by Congress a whole.
The claim of the second paragraph, especially that all men are created equal, simply, brilliantly, and beautifully echoes the teachings of St. Paul. We are neither Greek nor Jew, neither male nor female. I would go so far as to say that outside of scripture, this is the most important sentence ever written in human history. Its universalism is Stoic and Christian, not liberal.
Such universalism also comes from Cicero, no liberal or radical, but a profoundly conservative Stoic republican.
True law is right reason in agreement with Nature…. It is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect upon the wicked. It is a sin to try and alter this law, nor it is allowable to attempt to repeal a part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freedom from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable la will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one rule, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.
Adams and Jefferson adored Cicero. Right before he died at the wonderful age of 95, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last of the signers of the Declaration, assured an interviewer that despite his old age, he still had two constant companions: Jesus Christ and Cicero.
Further, when we look at the certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we see Locke, but we also see Aristotle. In book 10 of the Ethics, Aristotle notes that when we exercise our gifts, we are thanking God for that which he has gratuitously bestowed upon us. Happiness, then, is not a hedonistic satisfaction, but a striving for all that is good within us, individually. Each endowed with certain excellences, we human persons bring these gifts—along with our sinful nature—to the community, and if the community is functioning properly, it elevates and celebrates our individual excellences while tempering our failures.
The real radicalism—again, not necessarily liberalism, though Locke expressed it well—is that government is meant to secure our rights. When it fails to do so, we have not just the right but the DUTY to overthrow such government. Admittedly, this is far from conservative, but it is reformational.
The final paragraph of the Declaration, written by Congress, not the Deistic Jefferson, connects it to Abraham and to Moses, creating in its final sentence—pledging our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor—makes it not just a legal document, but a covenant. Again, one must ask, in what way is this liberal?
Or, take, for example, that critical but so often forgotten and often neglected founding document, the Old Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed unanimously by Congress that summer, and later re-affirmed by the House and the Senate in 1789. In its Article No. 1, it offers us something radical, a complete and wholesale toleration of all religions. But, it is Article No. 2 that reveals how deeply conservative the founding—and republicanism—is. In the first half of Article No. 2, we learn that the Common Law will be extended over the western territories. It should be remembered that each of the 13 colonies had already accepted the Common Law. Indeed, of the 28 grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, all 28 deal with violations of the common law.
Let’s pause here for a moment. The origins of the Common Law are pre-Christian, going back to the Germanic tribes. When the Christians encountered the Germanic tribes, they readily baptized the Common Law. So, for all intents and purposes, the Common Law—the law of the Anglo-Saxons, the law that emerges from culture and habit and tradition and norms and not from the top down, the law of rights such as a trial by jury and habeas corpus and being innocent before being guilty—becomes the law of the United States. In what possible way could this be liberal or radical? It could, frankly, get none more conservative, to paraphrase the prophetic and silly Spinal Tap. Not surprisingly, when Thomas Jefferson proposed a Seal of the United States, it showed on one side of the Seal the great Anglo-Saxon chiefs, Hengist and Horsa, invading the British Islands and making laws under Oak (the ancient Nordic pagan symbol of justice) trees. Granted, some of what I’ve just explained is more myth than fact. It was a myth that first found its way into Tacitus. Regardless, the Founding generation believed the myth as truth.
It is the end of Article No. 2, though, that is perplexing in its mix of the radical and the conservative. Like so much of the Founding, the Old Northwest Ordinance was an anti-political political statement. That is, as with most of the Founding, it served to restrict radically the political sphere and limit not only its reach but its very activity. Let’s look at the wording at the end of the Article: “in the just preservation of rights and property, it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall, in any manner whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide, and without fraud, previously formed.” Again, this is some of the most radical language of the founding, but it is radical as a means to preserve and conserve human dignity and liberty. Note what it states: the right to associate with one another—to create families, schools, businesses, churches, etc.—is a right separate from the political sphere. The political sphere, as such, may never interview with the right to associate unless that association had been fraudulent. This is, I would argue, the most radical and conservative republican statement of the era.
It’s worth comparing this with the language of the French Revolution. As the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen asserts, diabolically, in Article III: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.” In other words, in America, all rights and laws come from the experience and communities of the people, while in France, all rights and laws come from the imposition of a conformist, collectivist whole. Does this make American liberal? Again, I don’t see that. Here, the Founding again claims and conserves the foundation of the Natural Law.
This leaves us with the Constitution, Deneen’s main claim to a manifestation of liberalism. So, let’s ask. Is the Constitution a liberal document? Its three branches are echoes of the human person and the three ways of knowing. We have the faculty of the mind, rationality (our executive), the faculty of the stomach, passions (our democracy), and the faculty of the soul, reason (our aristocracy). Does this sound liberal? No. It sounds very conservative, rooted in the natural law.
The Bill of Rights is merely a ratification of the rights of Common Law, and, thus, conservative not liberal. Even something like the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, is the logical conclusion to “We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” thus, as noted above, echoing St. Paul. While the implications and the actual making it real was radical in the century after the Civil War, the principle of human equality and dignity is deeply conservative and goes back not just to St. Paul, but to the Stoics, and before them, Socrates, and even the Pre-Socratics such as Heraclitus and Thales, so desperately and brilliantly trying to find the first and universal cause and “stuff” of all human beings.
Again, while I see radical elements in the American Founding, I mostly see ways in which the Founding was conserving the best of the classical, medieval, and English past and effecting a reformation to make that which had gone wrong—the British imposition of Parliamentary and monarchical tyranny—right again. The American Revolution, as such, did not turn the world upside down, like the French or Russian Revolutions would, but rather turned the world rightside back.
As should be obvious from the above, I prefer not to place the Founding in terms of radical, conservative, or liberal, but much prefer the language of republicanism. This, I think, we can state with certainty. The founders did everything possible to limit the role of the democratic and preserve the republic (the common good, the res publica). Democracy, they knew, was a critical part of a republic because it represented one of the three ways of knowing, the passions of the stomach the pro-creative region. They did not, however, ever foresee that leading the republic. Hence, as of 1787, each citizen gets to vote ONLY for one member of the House of Representatives. We have no democratic say in the Senate, the Presidency, or the Supreme Court. Democracy represented a form of tyranny of the majority, selfishness, and violence, while republicanism represented a form of sovereignty of the community, the proper role of the excellent but fallen individual, and social harmony and stability.
All of this changed, of course, in the aftermath of the War of 1812 and the rise of radical evangelicalism, imperialism, and what would be called progressivism. Each dastardly introduced a sort of Rousseauvian democracy into the republic, corroding from within and ultimately centering power in the executive rather than in the legislature.
__________
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is “The Farm” (1887), by Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
