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February 17 - March 21, 2021
“sensitized mind [that] picked up and transmitted every novel vibration in the intellectual air.”
Novel eipgraph
There, his Spirit of Laws became “the common coin of learned discussion,”
due respect to national and local tradition.
Burke
“A wise republic should hazard nothing that exposes it to either good or bad fortune. The only good to which it should aspire is the perpetuation of its condition.”
Burkean
The Stamp Act, meant to assert British authority over the colonies and to raise revenue to pay for the French and Indian War, had been fought, successfully, leading to its repeal in 1766. But it soon was followed by other punitive moves by Parliament, collectively known as the Townshend Acts.
Columbia University. King’s was the most Tory of any college in the colonies, having been founded by Anglicans in conservative reaction to Princeton and Yale.
“Mr, Madison a gloomy, stiff creature, they say is clever in Congress, but out of it has nothing engaging or even bearable in his manners—the most unsociable creature in Existence,” commented Martha Dangerfield Bland, wife of another Virginian politician.25
Princeton was also the first national college, even before there was a nation.
The College of New Jersey of 1769 was “a provincial carbon copy of Edinburgh,” concludes Douglass Adair, a specialist in the intellectual history of the founders.
Arriving at Nassau Hall, which housed the college, Madison would have seen the bust of Homer then overlooking its central doorway.
William Bradford was the son of a Philadelphia printer,
Madison’s fellows noticed almost immediately his intense studiousness.51 Despite his physical fragility, Madison studied far into the night, even though the students were awakened at five o’clock for morning prayers.
The freshman course focused on Greek and Latin authors—Horace, Cicero’s Orations, Lucian’s Dialogues, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.
Hume had defined “moral philosophy” as “the science of human nature.”
“Our All is at Stake,”
1768, Samuel Adams penned a series of articles attacking the British, using the pseudonym Vindex, a reference to the Gaulish leader of what is now central France who rebelled against the emperor Nero.
Madison, eight years younger and at least eight inches shorter, would become the white son Jefferson never had.
Jeffersons—the Latinate lawyer, the flowery wooer of other men’s wives, the slave owner looking to increase his profits, the direct and powerful stylist of the Declaration.
conversational and lucid.
Unsettled times propel people to prominence quickly. A single pamphlet, or even one short essay, could put a person into the center of the public arena, especially if he or she could offer new ways to think about the emerging political order.
Alliterative
rocks of the Earth.
Cultural sediments; Burke via Eagleton
“If this be treason, make the most of it.” It was a magnificent bellow.
He was avaritious & rotten hearted. His two great passions were the love of money & of fame: but when these came into competition the former predominated.
forty-four-page pamphlet was printed with a quotation from Cicero
Adams wrote in February of that year, were that all men are equal, and that power is delegated to leaders by the people. These, he continued, “are the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, of Sydney, Harrington and Lock.”33 Ancient
I do not think my self equal to the Command I am honoured with.38
Slave rebellion was the great fear of the South, and the British contemplated taking advantage of it. Rumors spread that Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, planned to offer freedom to enslaved people who would fight for his side. “It is imagined our Governor has been tampering with the Slaves & that he has it in contemplation to make great Use of them in case of a civil war in this province,” a worried James Madison wrote to a friend.
Later that year Dunmore indeed issued a royal proclamation declaring martial law and promising freedom to slaves who joined the royal forces. This concern about freeing the slaves, concludes the historian Jill Lepore, was the factor that, more than the issues of taxation and representation, or the fighting in Massachusetts, “tipped the scales in favor of American independence.”42 Washington, learning about the proclamation from his encampment outside Boston, was alarmed. “That Arch Traitor to the Rights of Humanity, Lord Dunmore, should be instantly crushd,” he warned, without irony.
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public Passion must be Superiour to all private Passions.
The only work of prose fiction quoted in his literary commonplace book is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
“an appeal to the tribunal of the world.”
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,”
Jefferson was not required to persuade, only to order. But in Philadelphia he would hear coming through his window the voices of the people he now needed to address—the workingman, the European immigrant, the shopkeeper, the sailor.
to give “expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”
He was employing a plain American idiom while attempting to move the American mind into the future.
Jefferson emphatically wanted no establishment of religious authority or tests of belief. By contrast, the Delaware state constitution, written and adopted just thirty-five miles to the south in that same summer of 1776, required anyone holding office to “profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and . . . acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”15
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The last five words of that sentence sweep aside millennia of unequal births and preordained lives and define these new Americans as a people who subscribe to a revolutionary belief.
equal men are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the essence of Epicureanism.
Governments are made by men, he states, and receive their powers from “the consent of the governed.”
Barbie Toy story three
“Liberty, like Power, is only good for those who possess it,
Eagleton
“Let facts be submitted to a candid world,” Jefferson continues, and turns to his charges against the king, a list of some twenty sentences that constitutes about half the entire document.
Jefferson then delivers the sum of this indictment. The American people have weighed the character of the king and found him wanting. He just is not good enough for them. “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Reading this, one can almost hear the applause of the Scottish political philosophers. The final two
extraordinary feat, relaying a lifetime of classical learning about liberty and rights but employing strong, straightforward prose that could be read aloud on street corners and in taverns and understood by all who listened.
created a document of lasting philosophical and literary merit that still resonates today as we try to understand and direct our country.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the first American convention on women’s rights, shocked some Americans in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Declaration, which stated in part that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
In the same decade, dissident female millworkers in Lowell, Massachusetts, demanded “EQUAL RIGHTS, or death to the corporations.”32
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Then in August 1963, one hundred years after Lincoln, one of the most powerful moments in Martin Luther King Jr.’s best-remembered speech came when he quoted that same phrase. “I have a dream,” he declared, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
Fifteen years later, Harvey Milk, an openly gay San Francisco politician, again invoked that phrase in a speech when he said that, “No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence.”
Pauline Maier observes, part of the power of this section of the Declaration is that it’s more about “what we ought to be” rather than “what we are.”
