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April 25 - May 18, 2022
Franklin’s simple response: “A republic, if you can keep it.” For the ensuing 230-plus years, the American people, through extraordinary and at times existential challenges, have kept the republic. Creating such a form of government from scratch was an unprecedented, bold experiment in self-government—the American Experiment.
It should be noted that an important element of this freedom is the right—if not obligation—of citizens to participate in their governmental process by questioning government and inquiring about its actions.
But if there is a shared element to America’s culture, it is increasingly the view that the country should allow individuals to pursue their talents and ambitions, largely unfettered by central control or government interference, with merit and skill prevailing to the greatest extent possible. That is America’s real culture gene.
Interestingly, the most distinctive quality was viewed as the freedom of speech, with 64 percent of the respondents citing that freedom. Only one other quality polled above 50 percent—the opportunity to vote in free and fair elections, cited by 51 percent. A large percentage of those surveyed cared so much about a number of the freedoms they cherish that they indicated a willingness to risk their lives to protect them, with freedom of speech again polling at the top.
As to what those surveyed would most like to see America change to improve the country, the support for any given action was not overwhelming—but the two actions most cited were ending systemic racism and providing accessible, affordable health care for everyone.
“It is our obligation as historians and as citizens to think about the relationship between the past and the present and to reckon with whether the nation has lived up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence.”
From the beginning, America was an ideal—a new land, with fresh opportunities for those adventuresome enough to pursue them, in the belief that in so doing they could create a new, better life for themselves and their families.
We now think about how there were thirteen colonies, but really there were twenty-six, because there were the thirteen colonies in the Caribbean, which nobody really distinguished in any meaningful way. From the vantage of London, those are the colonies—all of them. The Caribbean colonies are the ones England really wanted to keep. Those colonies, which were just brutal death camps for Africans, were the sugar plantations. That was where England was making the most money off its colonies.
In the Caribbean, these slave-owning plantation owners would say, “We are outnumbered by our enslaved property thirty to one here. So you guys go off and rebel, but we actually need the British army.” During the war, Britain essentially made a choice to give up on the northern colonies, because why keep these sad colonies when all the riches are in the Caribbean?
The American victory was an incredible tragedy for enslaved people who were seeking their freedom. Britain had abolished slavery, and they had every reason to expect that the colonies would abolish slavery if they had not become independent.
I chose These Truths as the title for my book because of something I don’t think we reckon with fully as citizens—certainly not as often or as deeply as we need to: that an obligation of being a citizen in a democracy is the act of inquiry. Jefferson also says in the Declaration of Independence, “Let [these] facts be submitted to a candid world.”
The document is essentially a product of the Enlightenment and its passion for empirical observation and research and experiment. The nation is an experiment, and this is the statement of our obligation to participate in the experiment and to be keen observers of the results.
Why that preamble has become ubiquitous and why it is cherished is not because of what Jefferson meant when he wrote it, but because of the work that Black abolitionists did in the 1820s and 1830s to reinterpret those words.
Stephen Douglas says, “The Declaration of Independence was never meant to include Black people.” Lincoln says, “No, show me where in these documents it says this is a white man’s government.” Lincoln has largely gotten that argument from Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist who had been born into slavery and escaped. Douglass had been part of that movement to reinterpret the Declaration of Independence.
The Compromise of 1877 [which resolved the 1876 presidential election by having federal soldiers leave the southern states] is what people generally refer to when they say Reconstruction failed. Well before that, during Andrew Johnson’s besmirched presidency, the Confederacy is allowed to win the peace. That appeasement of the Confederate South is the single worst thing that happened in American history, in my view.
Also, bankruptcy protection was huge in the nineteenth century. Until bankruptcy reform in the 1840s, only Wall Street brokers can declare bankruptcy. Ordinary businesspeople can’t. But we democratize bankruptcy protection, because Americans decide risk is good, and if you want to encourage risk, you have to be willing to give people a clean slate. That’s part of a democratic sensibility too.
JL: I don’t believe in historical inevitability. Everything is contingent. Everything could have gone differently. I tend to not be very excited about presidential biography because it has a political consequence, which is to inflate our impression of the power of the presidency. The influence of the executive office is out of whack with our constitutional system.
I think the most transformational movement of the twentieth century was the constitutionalization of the New Deal. Therefore, Roosevelt would be high on my list of important presidents. When I think about Roosevelt’s presidency, I am attracted to explanations that have less to do with him than with how Americans came to accept the idea of the New Deal and its social welfare state—a set of arrangements that many Americans had been hostile to before. People didn’t know objectively how bad his polio was, but they knew he was a person who understood suffering. And that allowed for a kind of
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Eisenhower famously said that he feared for the nation when someone who had not seen combat occupied the office. Our worst military decisions have been made by people who never saw military service. The turn to an all-volunteer military is a good part of what is responsible for the forever wars of the end of the twentieth century. A legacy of Vietnam was the end of the draft, but the end of the draft worsened American foreign policy.
For instance, I have made the argument that the realignment of the party system, which has happened several times in American history, has always coincided with a technological innovation. So the invention of the penny press in the 1820s and 1830s makes possible the democratization of American politics and the rise of Andrew Jackson and the founding of the Democratic Party. The radio makes possible the New Deal.
But with regard to our general failure to want to think historically or to study the past in a meaningful way, we live largely in a world where there’s a crisis of other forms of knowledge. We don’t read poems to know things. I think we should. We think the only way you can know something now is with data, and the bigger the data, the better. The purpose of the computer, working with that kind of data, is to make predictions about the future. Which is to say, all we seem to want to know is about the future and not about the past.
What radicalizes the Virginians is that the governor decrees that any enslaved person who escapes from a plantation and fights for the British will earn their freedom. That is what commits the Virginians to wanting to declare independence. Their view is that the king is interfering with their rights of property, and they start to use that vocabulary, talking about the revolution.
DA: Adams was super busy. He was on every committee, and Jefferson was a kid. DR: He was thirty-three. DA: Exactly. He lived on the outskirts of town, and he didn’t like to socialize, and he didn’t seem to have a lot of friends. Adams thought, “This guy knows how to write, and he’s not very busy, so let’s get him elected to chair of this committee.”
It’s part of a compromise, because there was other language in the draft that was also antislavery, which Congress cut out. That cutting was the proslavery moment in the Declaration. It’s important to recognize that the compromises and structure of the Constitution were already in play at the moment of the Declaration.
That was a good compromise, because it incorporated all the different views about religion then in the colonies. To make a good compromise, you need the inclusion of all perspectives and voices. Bad compromise—slavery. That left a lot of people out in terms of thinking about whether this was a workable compromise. My ancestors did not think it was a workable compromise.
We forget that King George was also the elector of Hanover. He was a German monarch as well as being a British monarch. So when he engages Hessian troops, German troops, to come fight here, it’s not exactly calling in foreign mercenaries. He’s using all the forces of both his regimes to try to control the colonies.
The irony is that once in the colonies, these seekers of religious freedom and tolerance were not all that tolerant of those who had different religious beliefs than their own.
Puritans objected to the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, a middle way between Catholics and Protestants, that allowed the Anglican Church to preserve certain Catholic customs like kneeling and priestly vestments. Puritans were called Puritans because they wanted to purify the Church of England. They refused to conform to Anglican worship, and, as a result, many were imprisoned or lost their lands.
They came here because they wanted religious freedom for themselves, but once they got to Massachusetts Bay, they persecuted people of other religious faiths.
When Quakers started appearing in Massachusetts Bay, the Puritans literally put them on boats and deported them. Some refused to leave, or came back after being banished, including Mary Dyer, one of four Quakers between 1659 and 1661 who were hanged on Boston Common. So the Puritans were not religiously tolerant at all.
He wasn’t motivated by a desire to defend an abstract principle of religious toleration but by a fear that Protestants would ultimately end up oppressing Catholics. That’s exactly what happened: by the early 1700s, Catholics in Maryland were forbidden to vote, hold public office, or worship in public.
Jefferson was very suspicious of institutional, organized Christianity, which he called “priestcraft.” He thought that religion was interfering with people using their powers of reason.
But he thought that Jesus was an exemplary person. You may have heard the story about the Jefferson Bible: Jefferson took a pair of scissors to the Gospels and cut out all the miracles of Jesus and left the ethical teachings, which he found admirable.
Indigenous peoples already had their own religions, a variety of religions. They wouldn’t have called their beliefs “religious” because there wasn’t a word for religion in Indian languages. It was more like a way of life.
We know that enslaved Africans came to America with a number of different religions. Some practiced indigenous African religions. Some, from the Kingdom of Congo (in modern-day Angola), were Catholic. The Congolese king and many Congolese had converted to Catholicism in the fifteenth century.
What was really astonishing about the First Amendment is that, for the first time, it allowed people to not practice anything at all. At the time of the Revolution, nine of the thirteen colonies had an established church that people were legally required to pay taxes to, but now, on the federal level, there was no longer an established church.
Some historians have said that, even before George Washington, George Whitefield was the first intercolonial American hero. Everybody knew who he was.
So if a newspaper were to publish that soldiers were traveling from New York to Europe on such and such a ship at such and such a time, they’d be alerting an enemy government that could try to sink the ship. The Supreme Court used that as an example of something that would not be permitted under the First Amendment. Direct, egregious harm to the country, in other words.
He got on the phone and Carl said, “I want to ask you how your name came to be in the address book of James McCord, one of the burglars arrested at the Watergate.” And Hunt said, “Oh shit,” and hung up the phone.
The fact that this came so close does suggest that it nearly happened and it could happen again and that those founders were right who always said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” We always have to be vigilant. Democracy is never safe. We can never take it for granted.
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” —Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
“There has not been a treaty made between the United States and American Indians that has not been broken by the United States.”
Fewer than five million Americans are considered Native. About half of that population lives on reservations, which are areas set aside by the U.S. government for Native Americans to occupy (but not own). Sadly, reservations have not been paradises; rather, they are well known for their intense challenges, including high alcohol, drug, poverty, and suicide rates.
When we think about slavery in America, we tend to think about it as a story of chattel slavery, of African slavery. But slavery actually begins in the New World with Columbus and the enslavement of Indigenous peoples.
When the Pilgrims fired off their guns for a Thanksgiving celebration, ninety Wampanoags showed up. They thought the Pilgrims were under attack and came to hold up their alliance, not to share in a feast.
When we think about conversion, we tend to think that people have left one system of belief and moved into another system of belief, and that’s really not how it played for most Native people. Most were—and are—happy to keep multiple systems of belief going at the same time. For Native people, efficacy really was the bottom line in terms of spiritual practice. There’s plenty of evidence to think that Native people looked at Christians, and looked at the process of colonization, and imagined that there was some form of efficacy around Christianity. So you tend to get syncretic kinds of
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It depends on how you count, but Native Americans make up something like 1.7 percent of the American population. And it is a growing population. Native American numbers bottomed out in the 1900 census, when there were about 250,000 Native people who showed up in the census. We’re talking several millions today.
The bottom line is that Indian people’s unique political status, their self-determined management of sovereign Native lands, their resurgent demography and culture, and their control over significant natural resources means that Indian people are critical to the past and present of the United States. Native peoples make up 1.7 percent of the population, but Americans don’t often give Indians even 1.7 percent of their attention. That ought to change, and the sooner the better.
In the Civil War, how many Americans were killed? DREW GILPIN FAUST (DGF): There’s been research since my book came out that indicates a higher death toll than the one I suggested in 2008. I talk about 620,000 dead. The number that now is agreed upon by epidemiologists and analysts and demographers is more like 750,000. So it was about 2.5 percent of the population. That would be the equivalent of some seven million people today. Imagine if we had a war in which we had that kind of death toll.
DR: The Civil War lasted for four years. Why were so many people killed in that war, while in the Revolutionary War, which lasted a lot longer, there were something like 6,800 American casualties?
