Founding Myths

by Ray Raphael

  The major thrust of Adams’s argument—that the Declaration of Independence was more than a one-man affair—seems correct. Even so, Jefferson won the debate. The telling of history, if not history itself, was on his side. Before he died, he proposed that “Author of the Declaration of American Independence” be inscribed on his tomb. Although he accepted and even sought credit for penning the words, however, never did Jefferson seek credit for dreaming up the ideas.34 That unsolicited honor would be bestowed upon him by others, much later.

  THE LINCOLN REVIVAL

  During the Abraham Lincoln–Stephen A. Douglas debates of 1858, both participants based their arguments on the alleged authority of the Declaration of Independence. According to Lincoln, the Declaration had stated in “plain, unmistakable language” that “all men are created equal.” Douglas countered that these words were never intended to apply to “the Negro or . . . savage Indians, or the Feejee, or the Malay, or any other inferior or degraded race,” and he noted that many of the state and local declarations, which had preceded the congressional Declaration, had insisted that the states retain all authority over their own internal affairs.35 Although Douglas was probably correct on the first count, and certainly correct on the second, Lincoln rebutted both arguments. The second point was easy: Lincoln noted that his quarrel was only with the expansion of slavery, and this involved no violation of states’ rights.

  But what about those slaveholding Founding Fathers? How could Lincoln seriously maintain that they had believed in the equality of all men, including those they were holding in bondage?

  Lincoln argued that Jefferson had included the phrase “all men are created equal” for no immediate and practical purpose, but as a “promise” for the future. The “sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence” was to give “hope to all the world . . . that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”36 Since slavery was too firmly embedded at the time to permit practical opposition, Jefferson could do no more than issue this blanket pronouncement in favor of equality—“the father of all moral principles,” Lincoln called it—for the use of future generations.37

  Lincoln’s line of reasoning had, and still has, great appeal. Because of their alleged “promise” to the future, the signers of the Declaration of Independence can be released from any charge of moral culpability or hypocrisy.

  Historically, however, this is a difficult argument to sustain. Antislavery elements in the North made no mention of “equality” in instructing their delegates to state or federal conventions in 1776. Only in the slave-dependent South did the term “equality” appear. When the grand jury of the Cheraws District of South Carolina declared itself in favor of independence on May 20, 1776, it praised the new Constitution because it was “founded on the strictest principles of justice and humanity, where the rights and happiness of the whole, the poor and the rich, are equally secured,” yet in Revolutionary South Carolina, slaves were not seen as part of that “whole,” even though they constituted approximately half the population.38 The grand jury of Georgetown, South Carolina, also praised the new Constitution as “the most equitable and desirable that human imagination could invent”:

  The present Constitution of Government, formed by the late Congress of this Colony, promises to its inhabitants every happy effect which can arise from society. Equal and just in its principles, wise and virtuous in its ends; we now see every hope of future liberty, safety, and happiness confirmed to ourselves and our posterity.39

  Not even Lincoln would have dared to suggest that back in 1776 the white citizens of Georgetown, South Carolina, intended that “promise” to extend to their slaves.

  When Lincoln tried to portray the notion of “equality” as the “sentiment” of the nation’s founders, he gave full credit to Thomas Jefferson, the author of the words he cherished:

  All honor to Jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.40

  He was not the first to remake the master of Monticello—a man who preached against race-mixing and bred slaves for profit—into the architect of racial equality in America.41 During the Senate debates on the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1853, Benjamin Wade, a senator from Ohio, invoked the Declaration of Independence in a similar manner, and so did other opponents of slavery.42 But because of Lincoln’s presidential status and his role in ending slavery, his interpretation had an indelible, lasting impact.

  In establishing Jefferson as a prophet of egalitarian principles, Lincoln displayed great political savvy. He shrewdly co-opted the founder of the opposing political party, while he recruited one of the largest slave owners in Revolutionary Virginia to argue the antislavery case. Many would agree that Lincoln played his cards well in a game that really counted. The end in this case might justify the means, but that does not make his reading of the Declaration of Independence historically correct.

  The broad strokes of the Lincoln-Jefferson revival remain with us today. Routinely, current textbooks echo Lincoln’s notion of a “promise” made by the founders: “All people were not treated equally in America in 1776,” one states, “but the Declaration set high goals for equal treatment in the future.”43 Joy Hakim, in her popular History of US, writes that on July 4, 1776, “something happened . . . that changed the whole world.” That “something” was not the act of declaring independence: “It was the words they used in that declaration that made all the difference. . . . Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was great from the moment he wrote it, but it has grown even greater with the passing of time.”44 With this clever turn of phrase, Hakim celebrates Jefferson’s genius, his prophesy, and his ownership of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, like the words he penned, seems to have “grown even greater with the passing of time.”

  TEAM SPIRIT

  It has been several years since Pauline Maier retrieved from obscurity the other declarations of independence, and although college texts are beginning to embody her research, those documents receive scant mention in elementary, middle-school, and secondary texts, and in popular histories. Though such books give some ground—they now routinely mention that Jefferson was a member of a committee, for example—they fail to acknowledge the ubiquitous revolutionary upsurge that resulted in Revolution. If they mention any widespread revolutionary feeling, they credit yet one more autonomous perpetrator: Thomas Paine. Tom Paine (as he is casually called) supposedly swayed the minds of a fickle public who could not have attained true revolutionary status without him. In the reckless rush to commemorate Paine’s mastery over public opinion, some current texts list the contemporary sales of his Common Sense at an astounding half million, one for every free household in the thirteen colonies—even those with no literate individuals.45 Most other texts cite Paine’s own inflated numbers unquestioningly, even though he had no way of ascertaining his sales, and his three distinct estimates, offered at different times, are far from plausible.46

  According to classic narrative structure, the wise man—whether Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson—persuades the rest. Yet this individualistic/heroic model does not accurately describe how history works. A better model features collaborative effort—like that between Jefferson and Mason, who were participating in an ongoing dialogue as they penned their various declarations. An entire population took part in that robust dialogue, and here, the media is indeed the message. The dialogue itself
deserves celebration, not just its practical conclusion. If we disregard that public discussion, we cast a blind eye to one of history’s finest examples of popular involvement in momentous decision making.

  Whatever influence the Declaration of Independence has had on later history—and it has been great—at the time it was the fact of independence that shook the world, not the precise words used to justify it. Listen to what Jefferson had to say on the matter in the year before his death, for no one argues the question more persuasively:

  But with respect to our rights, and the acts of the British government contravening those rights, there was but one opinion on this side of the water. All American whigs thought alike on these subjects. When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we were compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.47

  Later that year, while supporting the promotion of relics he had used to draft the Declaration, Jefferson again insisted that his words were to be seen as no more than “the genuine effusion of the soul of our country.”48 Unfortunately, his most ardent admirers, in their quest for a solitary visionary, have failed to take seriously Jefferson’s honest and forthright pronouncement: the “authority” of the Declaration of Independence rests exclusively on the “harmonizing sentiments” of the American people.

  “It is really an assembly of demigods.”

  Barry Faulkner, National Archives, Washington, D.C., 1936.

  7

  AN ASSEMBLY OF DEMIGODS

  We know the story well. John Jay presented its broad outlines in the second Federalist essay, first published six weeks after the framers of the Constitution finished their deliberations in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787:

  This convention, composed of men who possessed the confidence of the people, and many of whom had become highly distinguished by their patriotism, virtue, and wisdom, in times which tried the minds and hearts of men, undertook the arduous task. In the mild season of peace, with minds unoccupied by other subjects, they passed many months in cool, uninterrupted, and daily consultation; and finally, without having been awed by power, or influenced by any passions except love for their country, they presented and recommended to the people the plan produced by their joint and very unanimous councils.1

  In Jay’s rendition, delegates to the Federal Convention (what we now call, in hindsight, the Constitutional Convention) were wise, dispassionate, and not in the least ambitious—in every respect, exemplars of what people at the time considered republican virtue. They did not practice interest-driven politics, in which people bicker with each other for political influence or economic gain. Jay cast the framers with a golden glow, and although slightly diffused, that light still shines today in our textbooks, popular histories, and political debates. We idolize the men who gave us our Constitution and often complain that the nation would be better off in their hands. Never a day passes without some politician, broadcast commentator, or blogger citing a founder to support his or her position on a contemporary issue totally unknown to late-eighteenth-century Americans. It’s a national sport, part and parcel of our current political debates.

  A PANTHEON—OR NOT?

  One oft-repeated quotation characterizes the Convention itself. Back in 1787, while delegates were still trying to hammer out the details for a new plan of government, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams: “It [the Convention] is really an assembly of demigods.” Jefferson, though, was in Paris at the time, and he had little knowledge of what was actually transpiring within the East Wing of the Pennsylvania State House, three thousand miles across the Atlantic. Nobody outside that chamber did. Delegates had taken a vow of secrecy, which they honored. This much Jefferson knew, and it bothered him: “I am sorry they began their deliberations by so abominable a precedent as that of tying up the tongues of their members,” he groused in the same letter to Adams, who was actually in London at the time, not Philadelphia. “Nothing can justify this example but the innocence of their intentions, & ignorance of the value of public discussions. I have no doubt that all their other measures will be good & wise.” It was one thing to oppose secrecy from such a safe distance, but had Jefferson participated in the Convention, in all likelihood he too would have seen that public disclosure of the proceedings would likely undermine the mystique, hinder prospects for ratification, and jeopardize the entire operation. Delegates were not acting like demigods but down-to-earth politicians, grumbling, cajoling, and calling each other’s bluffs. In the end, they fashioned workable and in some cases distasteful compromises that might not be ideologically pure but that appeared the least objectionable.2

  During the ratification debates that raged for ten months after the Convention, supporters of the proposed plan, calling themselves Federalists, lionized the framers, following the lines Jay used in his essay. Opponents, however, vilified them. Delegates had been instructed by the states to revise and amend the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union,” the young nation’s working set of rules, but instead, on their own authority, they had unilaterally thrown that document out, opponents observed. Vastly overreaching their authority, delegates to the Convention had both violated the trust of the people and created a new government that threatened the people’s liberties.

  Such divergent views of the framers continued in the politically turbulent 1790s, when the various branches of government, the emerging political parties, and the people themselves squabbled over what the Constitution really meant. Signers of the Declaration of Independence, by contrast, were universally regarded as true patriots, as were the men who had fought a war to protect independence. Through much of the nineteenth century textbooks reflected this difference: the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence received abundant attention, while drafting and ratification of the Constitution were typically covered in a page or even just a paragraph.

  After Reconstruction, in the wake of the Civil War, that changed. The major bone of contention in the Constitution—state versus federal powers with respect to slavery—had been settled at last. In the interest of national unity, texts began promoting the Constitution and the men who drafted it in the same hagiographic manner as they did the Declaration and the men who signed that document. “[The] framers [were] a race of statesmen—patriots, with the good of the whole country at the bottom of every act—not politicians merely, not men representing and fighting for State, local, or party, or individual interests,” wrote John Robert Irelan in an eighteen-volume text in 1888.3

  No interests at stake? In 1913, reflecting the class consciousness of the Progressive Era, Charles A. Beard, a professor at Columbia University, turned that story on its head. The primary object of many framers, he claimed, was to secure their fortunes, which were tied to government bonds.4 This theory stimulated a grand historical and educational debate that lasted through midcentury, but by the 1960s the framers were again in the driver’s seat. Textbooks, which had veered toward the Progressives, backed away from Beard. While they did acknowledge the daily and sometimes contentious political debates that characterized the Convention, they reintroduced the hagiogra
phic tone. All debates were resolved, and one was even celebrated through nomenclature: the so-called “Great Compromise” in which small states and large states supposedly buried the hatchet by allowing proportional representation in the House and representation by states in the Senate. In the end, political or economic interests were trumped by patriotism.

  TROUBLE ON MOUNT OLYMPUS

  True, debates at the Federal Convention did end in compromise, but how did that come to pass? Was the tone gentlemanly, as we might expect from our wise and virtuous founders? Investigating the event historically, looking at the process as well as the outcome, we are forced toward a different conclusion. There was no shortage of knockdown, drag-out battles, threats and counterthreats, and tough-minded political deal making. If these were gods, they were more of the Greek and Roman model, not above unleashing thunderbolts upon their enemies.

  On May 30, the first day of debates, James Madison of Virginia, the most populous state in the Union at that time, presented what he considered to be his bottom line: “that the equality of suffrage established by the Articles of Confederation ought not to prevail in the national Legislature, and that an equitable ratio of representation ought to be substituted.” That “equitable ratio,” if based on population, would give Virginia nine times the power of tiny Delaware. George Read, speaking on behalf of Delaware’s delegation, noted that he and his colleagues were under strict instructions from their state not to be party to any plan that changed the one-state, one-vote rule of voting under the existing Articles of Confederation, and if that rule were changed, they might well “retire from the Convention.” Whether Read’s statement was a bluff or in earnest, it had its effect, and the motion to change the representation in Congress was quickly tabled. Few delegates from other states wanted to chance the embarrassment of Delaware’s early departure.5