The American Spirit

by David McCullough

  We’ve seen the most divisive Congress in memory become the most united Congress in memory, for the time being at least. We have all of that to draw upon. And we have a further, all-important, inexhaustible source of strength. And that source of strength is our story, our history, who we are, how we got to be where we are, and all we have been through, what we have achieved.

  The Bulwark of Freedom

  OHIO UNIVERSITY

  Athens, Ohio

  2004

  For all of us who hold high the value of education and the life of the mind, all who believe our great centers of learning are among the highest, most important attainments of American life, a ceremony such as this is a glorious event. I feel especially honored to take part, as we celebrate both a historic year for Ohio University and a day-of-days for you who are about to receive your degrees.

  History is both now and then, today and yesterday. The founding year of this university, 1804, was long ago, and especially as measured by all that has happened over the last two centuries. In 1804, Thomas Jefferson was in the White House. Lewis and Clark were on their heroic journey. Abraham Lincoln had yet to be born.

  All part of the past, we say. No one lived in the past, only the present. You may be interested that the much-used expression “No time like the present” was written in the year 1696.

  So here we are on the 12th day of June, in the year 2004, the bicentennial year of Ohio University. At the heart of the university stands Cutler Hall, built in 1816, the oldest building on the campus and an eloquent testament to the vision of the founders.

  Now I must tell you that until recently I knew nothing about the Reverend Manasseh Cutler. It was only after receiving Dr. Glidden’s invitation that I did my homework, and the more I read the more amazed I was.

  Cutler Hall, Ohio University

  As a graduate of Yale University, I was delighted to learn that he was a graduate of Yale. As a resident of Massachusetts, I was pleased to find he lived in Ipswich, north of Boston, where he preached for more than fifty years. Then to my complete surprise, I read that shortly after he was married, he ran a store on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, only a few miles from where I live and work.

  And just a few days ago my wife and I visited his church and home, both of which still stand.

  What a remarkable life he had. He was three doctors in one, doctor of divinity, doctor of law, and a medical doctor, and at one time or other he practiced all three professions. He was, besides, a storekeeper, schoolmaster, army chaplain during the Revolutionary War, congressman, botanist, and astronomer.

  Indeed, he seems to have been a university unto himself, and it was he, Manasseh Cutler, who had the vision, as early as 1787, to establish a public university here, the first university west of the Alleghenies.

  Physically he was also impressive, tall, massive, and dressed always in ministerial black. But don’t picture a somber fellow. He was outgoing, affable, an entertaining storyteller who loved good company and a little politicking. “Social and genial, he was a lover of good cheer . . . a merry laugh was his delight,” reads an old account. And fortunately, he was brimming with intellectual curiosity and enterprise.

  He was, among other things, the first to attempt a systematic account of the flora of New England. Once, carrying a barometer, he climbed Mount Washington in New Hampshire, New England’s highest mountain. But it was when I read that he miscalculated the elevation at the top by no less than 2,600 feet, I felt that here we also have a fellow human being!

  Yet for all he packed into one life, nothing compared to his role in the creation of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

  Think of what that one act of the old Congress—that is the Congress under the Articles of Confederation—brought to pass. Few events in our history have had such far-reaching consequences.

  The Northwest Ordinance determined the social, political, and educational institutions for the whole territory that became the five great states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It provided all the basic rights that were eventually to be guaranteed by the Constitution. Further, it forever prohibited slavery in these states and encouraged public education, and all this as early as 1787.

  In language and content, the Northwest Ordinance was very like the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is the oldest written constitution still in use in the world today. Drafted by John Adams in 1779, during the Revolution, it includes a clause on education unlike any written before. But I will return to that.

  The Northwest Ordinance set the standards for five states that comprise in all 260,000 square miles, an area larger than France, five powerhouse states with a combined population today of 45 million people, five states that have come to represent so much that we think of as distinctly, proudly American, from Abraham Lincoln to the Wright brothers, from Cole Porter and Frank Lloyd Wright to John Glenn and Oprah Winfrey, from the hot dog and the automobile to Kellogg’s cereal and all but one of the five Great Lakes, not to say a conspicuous wealth of leading colleges and universities.

  Imagine, the five states established by the Northwest Ordinance have today a gross national product larger than France, larger than the United Kingdom.

  The part the Reverend Cutler played was primarily that of lobbyist. He set off in the early summer of 1787 for New York, to lobby the Congress for the Northwest Ordinance and negotiate the purchase of more than a million acres of land for the new Ohio Company, an enterprise that had been hatched by a number of Revolutionary War veterans in a tavern in Boston. Yes, it all began in a tavern.

  It was during his time in New York that the Northwest Ordinance was drafted and passed. The measure of his influence is difficult to determine. But assuredly it was considerable and apparently it was crucial.

  It’s quite a story. In his diary Reverend Cutler recounts vividly his journey to New York and his time there, giving particular attention to what he ate and the beautiful, accomplished women whose company he enjoyed while campaigning for the grand Ohio project.

  Less than a year later, the first settlement was established at Marietta, and the great migration from New England to Ohio was under way. It was called “Ohio Fever.” The first wagon bound for Ohio departed from in front of the Reverend Cutler’s church on December 3, 1787, as a historic sign there duly proclaims.

  Reverend Cutler came to look things over for himself in the summer of 1788. He made the journey from Ipswich to Marietta in a sulky, 751 miles in twenty-nine days, or better than twenty-five miles a day, which back then was top speed.

  As an ardent botanist, he gazed in sheer wonder at the trees of Ohio. One black walnut, he recorded, was forty-six feet in circumference.

  It was the Reverend Manasseh Cutler who insisted that ample land, the equivalent of two townships, “be given perpetually for the purpose of a university,” the historic ground where we are gathered today.

  As he wrote later to his son, “It is well known to all concerned with me in transacting the business of the Ohio Company, that the establishment of a university was a first object, and lay with great weight on my mind.”

  The essence of what is said of knowledge and education in the Northwest Ordinance is also to be found in what John Adams set forth for Massachusetts. The Massachusetts constitution states that “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of people [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.” It was the “duty” of the government, Adams wrote, to educate everybody.

  The Northwest Ordinance reads, “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and means of education shall be forever encouraged.”

  These are strong, clear declarations of faith in education as the bulwark of freedom.

  For self-government to work, the people must be educated.

  To what extent Cutler and Adams compared notes is not easily determined. But they did know one another. They dined together, as
Cutler writes in his diary. Cutler was active in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which Adams had helped to found. And Cutler is known to have attended the convention in Massachusetts that voted for Adams’s constitution.

  What the Northwest Ordinance underscores in its clause on education, and Adams did not, is happiness. And this is of greatest importance: Education was seen as the road to happiness, a view with which Adams fervently agreed. They all did in that age of the Enlightenment. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, each in his way made the point, many times. When our founders spoke of the “pursuit of happiness,” they did not mean long vacations or the piling up of things.

  Happiness was in the enlargement of one’s being through the life of the mind and of the spirit. And what was true for the individual was true for a people. Washington, who regretted all his life that he never had the advantage of a formal education, wrote, “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”

  Everything was of interest and there was virtually nothing that could not be learned through a close study of books. That was the creed. “I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading,” Adams wrote as a young man. “I cannot live without books,” Jefferson famously told Adams in their old age.

  Now in the long-standing tradition of commencement speakers, let me offer a few closing thoughts especially for you of the Class of 2004, who are about to set off on your new lives.

  • Be glad you’re in your shoes.

  • We, the older generations, are all for you. You’re needed. Your energy, your originality, your idealism are all needed.

  • Never forget that one of the greatest of our freedoms is the freedom to think for yourself.

  • Read. Read poetry, read biography, read the great literature that has stood the test of time. Read history.

  • When bad news is riding high and despair in fashion, when loud mouths and corruption seem to own center stage, when some keep crying that the country is going to the dogs, remember it’s always been going to the dogs in the eyes of some, and that 90 percent, or more, of the people are good people, generous-hearted, law-abiding, good citizens who get to work on time, do a good job, love their country, pay their taxes, care about their neighbors, care about their children’s education, and believe, rightly, as you do, in the ideals upon which our way of life is founded.

  • See the world. Take up painting. Or the piano. Discover how much you never knew about insects. In the spirit of Manasseh Cutler, go climb a mountain. And skip the barometer.

  • Whenever you check out of a hotel or motel, be sure you tip the maid.

  Knowing Who We Are

  HILLSDALE COLLEGE

  Hillsdale, Michigan

  2005

  Lord Bolingbroke, who was an eighteenth-century political philosopher, called history “philosophy taught with examples.” An old friend, the late Daniel Boorstin, who was a very good historian and Librarian of Congress, said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers. We’re raising a lot of cut flowers and trying to plant them, and that’s much of what I want to talk about tonight.

  The task of teaching and writing history is infinitely complex and infinitely seductive and rewarding. And it seems to me that one of the truths about history that needs to be made clear to a student or to a reader is that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at almost any point, just as your own life can. You never know. One thing leads to another. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Actions have consequences. These observations all sound self-evident. But they’re not—and particularly to a young person trying to understand life.

  And just as we don’t know how things are going to turn out for us, those who went before us didn’t either. It’s all too easy to stand on the mountaintop as a historian or biographer and find fault with people for why they did this or didn’t do that, because we’re not involved in it, we’re not there inside it, we’re not confronting what we don’t know—as those who preceded us were.

  Nor was there ever a self-made man or woman as much as we Americans love that expression. Everyone who’s ever lived has been affected, changed, shaped, helped, or hindered by others. We all know, in our own lives, who those people are who’ve opened a window, given us an idea, given us encouragement, given us a sense of direction, self-approval, self-worth, or who have straightened us out when we were on the wrong path. Most often they have been parents. Almost as often they have been teachers.

  Stop and think about those teachers who changed your life, maybe with a single sentence, maybe with one lecture, maybe by just taking an interest in your struggle. Family, teachers, friends, rivals, competitors—they’ve all shaped us.

  And so, too, have people we’ve never met, never known, because they lived long before us. They, too, have shaped us—they who composed the music that moves us, the painters, the poets, those who have written the great literature in our language. We walk around every day, every one of us, quoting Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pope. We don’t know it, but we are, all the time. We think this is our way of speaking. It isn’t our way of speaking—it’s what we have been given.

  The laws we live by, the freedoms we enjoy, the institutions that we take for granted—and we should never take for granted—are all the work of others who went before us. And to be indifferent to that isn’t just to be ignorant, it’s to be rude. And ingratitude is a shabby failing.

  How can we not want to know about the people who have made it possible for us to live as we live, to have the freedoms we have, to be citizens of this greatest of countries? It’s not just a birthright, it is something that others struggled and strived for, often suffered for, often were defeated for and died for, for the next generation, for us.

  Now, those who wrote and signed their names to the Declaration of Independence that fateful summer of 1776 were by no means superhuman. Every single one had his flaws, his weaknesses. Some of them ardently disliked others of them. Each did things in life he regretted. But the fact that they could rise to the occasion as they did, these imperfect human beings, and do what they did is also, of course, a testimony to their humanity.

  We are not just known by our failings, by our weaknesses, by our sins. We are known by being capable of rising to the occasion with the courage of our convictions.

  The Greeks said that character is destiny, and the more I read of the human story, the more convinced I am they were right. You look at the great portraits by John Trumbull or Charles Willson Peale or John Singleton Copley or Gilbert Stuart of those remarkable leaders present at the creation of our nation, you realize they aren’t just likenesses. They are delineations of character and were intended to be. And we need to understand that they, the founders, knew that what they had created was no more perfect than they were. And that this has been to our advantage. It has been good that it wasn’t all just handed to us in perfect condition, all ready to run smoothly in perpetuity—that it needed to be constantly attended to and improved and made to work better.

  I have just returned from a cruise through the Panama Canal. I think often about why the French failed at Panama and why we succeeded. One of the reasons is that we were attuned to adaptation, to doing what works, whereas the French engineers were trained to do everything in a certain way. We Americans have a gift for improvisation. We improvise in jazz; we improvise in many of our architectural breakthroughs. Improvisation is one of our traits, as a people, because it was essential, it was necessary, because again and again and again we were attempting what hadn’t been done before.

  Keep in mind that when we were founded by those Americans of the eighteenth century, none had had any prior experience in revolutions or nation making. They were, as we would say, winging it. They were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their liv
es or looking at us from the paper money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge in 1775, was forty-three, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was forty. Benjamin Rush—one of the most interesting of them all—was thirty when he signed the Declaration.

  They were young people, feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn’t a bank in the entire country. It was a country of just 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery.

  And think of this: Few nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.

  In the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington hangs John Trumbull’s great painting The Declaration of Independence. It’s our best-known scene from our past. And almost nothing about it is accurate. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed on July 4. They didn’t start to sign the Declaration until August 2, and only a part of the Congress was then present. The rest would be coming back for months to follow to take their turn signing.

  The Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull

  The chairs in the painting are wrong, the doors are in the wrong place. There were no heavy draperies at the windows, as in the painting, and the display of military flags and banners on the back wall is strictly a figment of Trumbull’s imagination.

  What is accurate are the faces. Each and every one of the forty-seven men in that painting is an identifiable—and thus accountable—individual. We know what they look like. We know who they were. And that’s what Trumbull wanted. He wanted us to know them and not forget them. Because this momentous step wasn’t a proclamation being handed down by a potentate or a king or a czar. It was the decision of a Congress acting freely.