The Glorious Cause of America

By: David McCullough (1933-2022)

Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “1776” and “John Adams,” gave this address at Brigham Young University on September 27, 2005.

“One of the hardest, and I think the most important, realities of history to convey to students or readers of books or viewers of television documentaries is that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Any great past event could have gone off in any number of different directions for any number of different reasons. We should understand that history was never on a track. It was never preordained that it would turn out as it did.

Very often we are taught history as if it were predetermined, and if that way of teaching begins early enough and is sustained through our education, we begin to think that it had to have happened as it did. We think that there had to have been a Revolutionary War, that there had to have been a Declaration of Independence, that there had to have been a Constitution, but never was that so. In history, chance plays a part again and again. Character counts over and over. Personality is often the determining factor in why things turn out the way they do.

Furthermore, nobody ever lived in the past. Jefferson, Adams, George Washington—they didn’t walk around saying, “Isn’t this fascinating living in the past? Aren’t we picturesque in our funny clothes?” They were living in the present, just as we do. The great difference is that it was their present, not ours. And just as we don’t know how things are going to turn out, they didn’t either.

We can know about the years that preceded us and about the people who preceded us. And if we love our country—if we love the blessings of a society that welcomes free speech, freedom of religion, and, most important of all, freedom to think for ourselves—then surely we ought to know how it came to be. Who was responsible? What did they do? How much did they contribute? How much did they suffer?

Abigail Adams, writing one of her many letters to her husband, John, who was off in Philadelphia working to put the Declaration of Independence through Congress, wrote, “Posterity who are to reap the blessings, will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”[1] Alas, she was right. We do not conceive what they went through.

We tend to see them—Adams, Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, George Washington—as figures in a costume pageant; that is often the way they’re portrayed. And we tend to see them as much older than they were because we’re seeing them in the portraits by Gilbert Stuart and others when they were truly the Founding Fathers—when they were president or chief justice of the Supreme Court and their hair, if it hadn’t turned white, was powdered white. We see the awkward teeth. We see the elder statesmen.

At the time of the Revolution, they were all young. It was a young man’s–young woman’s cause. George Washington took command of the Continental Army in the summer of 1775 at the age of 43. He was the oldest of them. Adams was 40. Jefferson was all of 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Rush—who was the leader of the antislavery movement at the time, who introduced the elective system into higher education in this country, who was the first to urge the humane treatment of patients in mental hospitals—was 30 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence. Furthermore, none of them had any prior experience in revolutions; they weren’t experienced revolutionaries who’d come in to take part in this biggest of all events. They were winging it. They were improvising.

George Washington had never commanded an army in battle before. He’d served with some distinction in the French and Indian War with the colonial troops who were fighting with the British Army, but he’d never commanded an army in battle before. And he’d never commanded a siege, which is what he took charge of at Boston, where the rebel troops—the “rabble in arms”[2] as the British called them—had the British penned in inside Boston.

Washington wasn’t chosen by his fellow members of the Continental Congress because he was a great military leader. He was chosen because they knew him; they knew the kind of man he was; they knew his character, his integrity.

George Washington is the first of our political generals—a very important point about Washington. And we’ve been very lucky in our political generals. By political generals, I don’t mean to suggest that is a derogatory or dismissive term. They are political in the sense that they understand how the system works, that they, as commander in chief, are not the boss. Washington reported to Congress. And no matter how difficult it was, how frustrating it was, how maddening it could be for Washington to get Congress to do what so obviously needed to be done to sustain his part in the fight, he never lost patience with them. He always played by the rule. Washington was not, as were Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton, a learned man. He was not an intellectual. Nor was he a powerful speaker like his fellow Virginian Patrick Henry. What Washington was, above all, was a leader. He was a man people would follow. And as events would prove, he was a man whom some—a few—would follow through hell.

Don’t get the idea that all of those who marched off to serve under Washington were heroes. They deserted the army by the hundreds, by the thousands as time went on. When their enlistments came up, they would up and go home just as readily as can be, feeling they had served sufficiently and they needed to be back home to support their families, who in many cases were suffering tremendously for lack of income or even food. But those who stayed with him stayed because they would not abandon this good man, as some of them said. What Washington had, it seems to me, is phenomenal courage—physical courage and moral courage. He had high intelligence; if he was not an intellectual or an educated man, he was very intelligent. He was a quick learner—and a quick learner from his mistakes. He made dreadful mistakes, particularly in the year 1776. They were almost inexcusable, inexplicable mistakes, but he always learned from them. And he never forgot what the fight was about—“the glorious cause of America,” as they called it. Washington would not give up; he would not quit.

When he took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge in the summer of 1775, Washington had probably 14,000 troops. And from those troops and from the officers who were there at the time when he arrived, he selected two men as the best he had. Here is another aspect of his leadership that must not be overlooked or underestimated: Washington was a great judge of other people’s ability and capacity to stay where the fighting was the toughest and to never give up. He picked out Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox.

Nathanael Greene was a Quaker with a limp from a childhood injury. He knew no more of the military than what he had read in books, and he was made a major general at 33 years of age. Henry Knox was 25. He was a Boston bookseller. He was a big, fat, garrulous, keenly intelligent man who, like Greene, had only about the equivalent of a fifth-grade education but had never stopped reading. He, too, knew of the military only what he had read in books. But keep in mind that this was occurring in the 18th century, their present. It was the Age of Enlightenment, an era when it was widely understood that if you wanted to know something, a good way to learn was to read books—a very radical idea to many in our day and age.

Those two men were quintessential New Englanders. Greene was from Rhode Island and Knox had grown up in Boston. Washington had discovered very soon after arriving in New England that he ardently disliked New Englanders, so to single out these two, he also overcame a personal bias.

To skip far ahead, let me point out that Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox, along with Washington, were to be the only general officers in the Revolutionary War who stayed until the very end. So Washington’s judgment could not have been better. Nathanael Greene turned out to be the best general we had, and I’m including Washington in that lineup—Greene, the Quaker with a limp, the man who knew nothing but what he had read in books, who, like Washington, learned from his mistakes.

Let’s not forget what a war it was—eight and a half years, the longest war in our history, except for Vietnam. Twenty-five thousand Americans were killed. That doesn’t sound like very much to those of us who have been bludgeoned, who have been numbed by the horrible statistics of war in the 20th or 21st centuries. This was 1 percent of the American population of 2.5 million. It was a lot. If we were to fight for our independence today and the war were equally costly, there would be more than 3 million of us killed. It was a long, bloody, costly war.

And as it wore on in the year 1776, we suffered one defeat after another. At Brooklyn—a huge battle over an area of six miles with 40,000 soldiers involved—we were soundly defeated. We were made to look foolish. We were outsmarted, outflanked, outgeneraled, outnumbered. Some of us were immensely heroic, but we never had a chance.

But then, in a miraculous escape from Brooklyn Heights on the night of Oct. 29, we got back across the East River and were saved. It was the Dunkirk of the Revolution. If the wind had been in the other direction that night or the two or three nights preceding it, there’s not much question that the war would have been over then because Washington and 9,000 American troops would have been captured. If the British had been able to bring their warships up into the East River, between Brooklyn and Manhattan, they would have had us right in the trap. But because there was a howling storm out of the northeast, they weren’t able to do that. 

Washington ordered that every possible small craft be rounded up and be made ready to bring the army back to New York. It was to be done at night. An organized retreat for an experienced army is the most difficult maneuver of all when faced by a superior force. But for this amateur pick-up team, this rude, crude, un-uniformed, undisciplined, untrained American army of farm boys—some of whom had been given a musket and told to march off only a few weeks before—for that kind of an army to make a successful retreat across water at night, right in the face of the enemy without the enemy knowing, was a virtual impossibility. And yet they did it.

When they went down to the shores of the East River, right where the Brooklyn Bridge now stands, to start the crossing, the same wind that was keeping the British from bringing their fleet up was keeping the river too rough for them to make the crossing. It looked as though they weren’t going to be able to pull it off. Then, all of a sudden, almost like the parting of the waters, the wind stopped. The makeshift armada started going back and forth, back and forth, all night long, ferrying men, horses, cannon—everything—back across the river to New York. And they succeeded. Nineteen thousand men and all their equipment—horses, cannon, and the rest—were taken across the river that night without the loss of a single man and without the British ever knowing it.

I wanted to write about that event, the reality of what happened there, as much as anything else in my book 1776. It shows so much that we need to understand. First of all, it was said right away that the hand of God had intervened in behalf of the American cause. Others trying to interpret what had happened used the words Providence or chance. But it couldn’t have happened only because of chance or the hand of God. It also required people of skill and experience with the nerve to try it.

That escape was organized and led by a man named John Glover from Marblehead, Mass., and his Marblehead Mariners—fishermen, sailors who knew how to handle small boats. During the crossing—and the East River can be a treacherous place to cross, even in the best of conditions—boats were loaded down so that the gunwales were only a few inches above the water. No running lights, no motors, no cell phones to talk back and forth. And they did it. It was character and circumstance in combination that succeeded.

The men were totally demoralized. They had been defeated; they were soaking wet; they were cold; they were hungry. They lost again pathetically at Kip’s Bay. They lost again in the great battle of Fort Washington, when nearly 3,000 of our troops and all of their equipment were taken captive.

By the time Washington started his long retreat across New Jersey, they were down to only a few thousand men. Probably a quarter of the army were too sick to fight, victims of smallpox, typhoid, typhus, and, worst of all, camp fever, or epidemic dysentery. Men deserted, men defected—went over to the enemy by the hundreds. Or they just disappeared, they just went away, never heard from again. By the time Washington was halfway across New Jersey, he had all of 3,000 men.

We are taught to honor and celebrate those great men who wrote and voted for the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. But none of what they committed themselves to—their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor—none of those noble words about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, about all men being created equal, none of that would have been worth any more than the paper it was written on had it not been for those who were fighting to make it happen. We must remember them, too, and especially those who seem nameless: Jabez Fitch and Joseph Hodgkins; little John Greenwood, who was all of 16 years old; and Israel Trask, who was 10 years old. There were boys marching with the troops as fifers or drummers or messenger boys, not just Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox and John Glover and George Washington. And they were in rags—they were in worse than rags. The troops had no winter clothing. The stories of men leaving bloody footprints in the snow are true—that’s not mythology.

Washington was trying to get his army across the Delaware River, to put the river between his army and the oncoming British army, which was very well equipped, very well fed, very well trained—the best troops in the world led by an extremely able officer, Cornwallis. On they were coming, and they were going to end the war. But Washington felt that if he could just get across the river, get what men he had left over on the Pennsylvania shore on the western side, destroy any boats the British might use to come chasing across the river, that they’d have time to collect themselves and maybe get some extra support. Again they went across at night. Again it was John Glover and his men who made it happen. They lit huge bonfires on the Pennsylvania side of the river to light the crossing.

The next morning a unit from Pennsylvania rode in—militiamen, among whom was a young officer named Charles Willson Peale, the famous painter. He walked among these ragged troops of Washington’s who had made the escape across from New Jersey and wrote about it in his diary. He said he’d never seen such miserable human beings in all his life—starving, exhausted, filthy. One man in particular he thought was just the most wretched human being he had ever laid eyes on. He described how the man’s hair was all matted and how it hung down over his shoulders. The man was naked except for what they called a blanket coat. His feet were wrapped in rags, his face all covered with sores from sickness. Peale was studying him when, all of a sudden, he realized that the man was his own brother.

I think we should feel that they were all our brothers, those brave 3,000, and remember what they went through, just as Abigail Adams stressed in her letter. And that they didn’t quit!

Washington took stock, just as the British army was taking stock, of the situation, as were most every officer and all of the politicians, many of whom had fled from Philadelphia by this time. It seemed clear that the British were heading for Philadelphia and there was nothing to stop them. Most everybody concluded that the war was over and we had lost. It was the only rational conclusion one could come to. There wasn’t a chance. So Washington did what you sometimes have to do when everything is lost and all hope is gone. He attacked. 

They went up the river nine miles to McKonkey’s Ferry on Christmas night. They crossed the Delaware, famously portrayed in the great painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which as everyone knows is inaccurate in many ways. But it does portray with drama and force what was one of the most important turning points, not just in the history of the war, but in the history of our country and, consequently, of the world. He had the nerve, the courage, the faith in the cause to carry the war once more to the enemy. After the crossing, they marched nine miles back down the river on the eastern side and struck at Trenton the next morning. 

The worst part of the whole night was not the crossing, as bad as it was. The worst part was the march through the night. Again a northeaster was blowing, and again that northeaster was beneficial to our cause because it muffled the noise of the crossing and the noise of the march south. But it also increased by geometric proportions the misery of the troops. It was very cold. What the wind chill factor must have been can only be imagined. It was so cold that two men froze to death on the march because they had no winter clothing. 

They struck at Trenton the next morning. It was a fierce, house-to-house, savage battle. It was small in scale but very severe. It was all over in about 45 minutes, and we won. For the first time, we defeated the enemy at their own profession.

Now it wasn’t a great battle like Brooklyn. But its consequences were enormous, beyond reckoning. Because of the psychological effect, it transformed the attitude of the army and of much of the country toward the war. It was a turning point. They struck again at Princeton a few days later and won there too—again by surprise, again after marching through the night, again taking the most daring possible route, risking all and winning. In conclusion I want to share a scene that took place on the last day of the year of 1776, Dec. 31. All the enlistments for the entire army were up. Every soldier, because of the system at the time, was free to go home as of the first day of January 1777. Washington called a large part of the troops out into formation. He appeared in front of these ragged men on his horse, and he urged them to reenlist. He said that if they would sign up for another six months, he’d give them a bonus of 10 dollars. It was an enormous amount then because that’s about what they were being paid for a month—if and when they could get paid. These were men who were desperate for pay of any kind. Their families were starving.

The drums rolled, and he asked those who would stay on to step forward. The drums kept rolling, and nobody stepped forward. Washington turned and rode away from them. Then he stopped, and he turned back and rode up to them again. This is what we know he said:

My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected, but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty, and to your country, which you can probably never do under any other circumstance.3

Again the drums rolled. This time the men began stepping forward. “God Almighty,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “inclined their hearts to listen to the proposal and they engaged anew.”[4]

 Now that is an amazing scene, to say the least, and it’s real. This wasn’t some contrivance of a screenwriter. However, I believe there is something very familiar about what Washington said to those troops. It was as if he was saying, “You are fortunate. You have a chance to serve your country in a way that nobody else is going to be able to, and everybody else is going to be jealous of you, and you will count this the most important decision and the most valuable service of your lives.” Now doesn’t that have a familiar ring? Isn’t it very like the speech of Henry V in Shakespeare’s play Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . . And gentlemen in England now a-bed / Shall think themselves accursed they were not here”?[5] Washington loved the theater; Washington loved Shakespeare. I can’t help but feel that he was greatly influenced. 

He was also greatly influenced, as they all were, by the classical ideals of the Romans and the Greeks. The history they read was the history of Greece and Rome. And while Washington and Knox and Greene, not being educated men, didn’t read Greek and Latin as Adams and Jefferson did, they knew the play Cato, and they knew about Cincinnatus. They knew that Cincinnatus had stepped forward to save his country in its hour of peril and then, after the war was over, returned to the farm. Washington, the political general, had never forgotten that Congress was boss. When the war was at last over, Washington, in one of the most important events in our entire history, turned back his command to Congress—a scene portrayed in a magnificent painting by John Trumbull that hangs in the rotunda of our national Capitol. When George III heard that George Washington might do this, he said that “if he does, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

So what does this tell us? That the original decision of the Continental Congress was the wise one. They knew the man, they knew his character, and he lived up to his reputation.

I hope very much that those of you who are studying history here will pursue it avidly, with diligence, with attention. I hope you do this not just because it will make you a better citizen, and it will; not just because you will learn a great deal about human nature and about cause and effect in your own lives, as well as the life of the nation, which you will; but as a source of strength, as an example of how to conduct yourself in difficult times—and we live in very difficult times, very uncertain times. But I hope you also find history to be a source of pleasure. Read history for pleasure as you would read a great novel or poetry or go to see a great play.

And I hope when you read about the American Revolution and the reality of those people that you will never think of them again as just figures in a costume pageant or as gods. They were not perfect; they were imperfect—that’s what’s so miraculous. They rose to the occasion as very few generations ever have.”

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Notes
1. Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 8, 1777, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; spelling modernized.
2. John Burgoyne, in Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1926), vol. 1, p. 298.
3. Sergeant R——, “Battle of Princeton,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 20 (1896), pp. 515–16.
4. Nathanael Greene to Nicholas Cooke, Jan. 10, 1777, in The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, ed. Richard K. Showman and Dennis Conrad (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), vol. 2, p. 4.
5. Henry V 4.3.63–68.

The "Revolution" of 1800

The presidential election of 1800 was an intense political contest. Pitting two clearly opposing parties against each other for the first time, the Federalists and the Republicans (organized in 1792, later called "Democratic Republicans") fought in what some historians have called the dirtiest campaign in US politics. Referred to by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 as “The Revolution of 1800,” the election results marked the first peaceful change of executive party in the U.S. and confirmed the role of both compromise and the electorate in choosing the American president. The election was also a political realignment that ushered in a generation of Democratic-Republican leadership through 1825.

"The nation had a choice between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Federalists feared that Jefferson would return power to the states, dismantle the army and navy, and overturn Hamilton's financial system. The Republicans charged that the Federalists, by creating a large standing army, imposing heavy taxes, and using federal troops and the federal courts to suppress dissent, had shown contempt for the liberties of the American people. They worried that the Federalists' ultimate goal was to centralize power in the national government and involve the United States in the European war on the side of Britain. Jefferson's Federalist opponents called him an "atheist in religion, and a fanatic in politics." They claimed he was a drunkard and an enemy of religion. The Federalist Connecticut Courant warned that "there is scarcely a possibility that we shall escape a Civil War. Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced."

Jefferson's supporters responded by charging that President Adams was a monarchist who longed to reunite Britain with its former colonies. Republicans even claimed that the president had sent General Thomas Pinckney to England to procure four mistresses, two for himself and two for Adams. Adams's response: "I do declare if this be true, General Pinckney has kept them all for himself and cheated me out of my two."

The election was extremely close. It was the Constitution's Three-fifths clause, which counted three-fifths of the slave population in apportioning representation, that gave the Republicans a majority in the Electoral College. Jefferson appeared to have won by a margin of eight electoral votes. But a complication soon arose. Because each Republican elector had cast one ballot for Jefferson and one for Burr, the two men received exactly the same number of electoral votes.

Under the Constitution, the election was now thrown into the Federalist-controlled House of Representatives. Instead of emphatically declaring that he would not accept the presidency, Burr declined to say anything. So, the Federalists faced a choice. They could help elect the hated Jefferson--"a brandy-soaked defamer of churches"--or they could throw their support to the opportunistic Burr. Hamilton disliked Jefferson, but he believed he was a far more principled and honorable man than Burr. [As the House of Representatives prepared to vote to break the deadlock, Hamilton conducted a furious letter-writing campaign to urge fellow Federalists to vote for Jefferson].

As the stalemate persisted, Virginia and Pennsylvania mobilized their state militias. Recognizing, as Jefferson put it, "the certainty that a legislative usurpation would be resisted by arms," the Federalists backed down. After six days of balloting and 36 ballots, the House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States."[1]

On March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson walked from his boarding house to the Senate Chamber. John Adams had already left Washington, and as was the custom at the time, Jefferson gave his inaugural address before taking the oath as president. Uncomfortable speaking in public, he addressed an audience of approximately 1,000 people for fewer than 30 minutes. The speech was printed in the newspapers the next day and was well received by members of both parties. A significant passage follows:

During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things...

[E]very difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it...."[2]

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[1] https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=2978 

[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jefinau1.asp

The Great Pillars of Human Happiness: Religion, Virtue, and Republican Liberty

By: Tony Williams

In his First Inaugural Address as the first President of the new United States, George Washington echoed the Puritan idea that America was a “city upon a hill.” He stated that, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” 

Do not forget that the Americans were attempting something radically new in a world of monarchy, despotism, and tyranny ~ governing themselves by their own consent. They were attempting something that had failed in Greece . . . then in Rome . . . then in the Renaissance Italian city-states ~ self-government, democracy, republicanism. Americans had a great opportunity to attempt that great experiment and had a sacred obligation to preserve that liberty and govern themselves. If they succeeded, they would prove to the world that self-government were possible, and if they failed, it would definitively show that man was meant to be governed by another, meant to be dependent rather than independent and free. 

As Alexander Hamilton said in Federalist Paper #1: 

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government by reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. 

Most of the Founding Fathers thought it was doomed to failure for at some point in the future, human nature might again sink to its depths and the experiment would collapse. How would it thrive and endure? Upon what great pillars would be edifice be erected? 

Let us allow the Founding Fathers to answer these questions in their own words.

George Washington said, “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” 

John Adams said, “Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence than the body can live and move without a soul.” 

His radical cousin, Samuel Adams, said: “Public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals. Men will be free no longer than they remain virtuous.” 

Even the more libertine Benjamin Franklin agreed: Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” 

James Madison mocked the idea that any other conclusion was reasonable: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty and happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” 

Indeed, Richard Henry Lee thought it axiomatic and self-evident: “It is certainly true that a popular government cannot flourish without virtue in the people.” 

Patrick Henry said it too, though with his typical verve: Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed.” 

But, what is virtue? Vir is the Latin for man, so it is how a man acts. Well, there are seven cardinal virtues in Christianity which present a juxtaposition to the seven deadly sins; there are classical virtues from ancient Greece. The republican virtues of the American Revolution were patriotism, self-sacrifice, serving the public good, morality, frugality, and simplicity. 

Perhaps Madison is right, and the conclusion is inescapable ~ liberty without virtue is anarchy and a government without cannot endure. The common answer of these Founding Fathers was that a self-governing people must literally govern themselves, their passions, their desires. They were free and independent men but their liberty was not one of licentiousness; it was an ordered liberty. A liberty governed by virtue. 

OK, so I think I’ve show that the Founders thought virtue was necessary in a self-governing people. But, there is a great unanswered question. Exactly how was virtue to be inculcated in the republican American people? 

Thomas Jefferson offered an answer that men would become virtuous when they were taught by the great minds and philosophers of the past. These appeared in his curriculum for the University of Virginia. He thought, “No government can continue but under the control of the people; and their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice.” Jefferson continues, “These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.” 

Jefferson’s answer is at least partly satisfying, and would probably go a long way toward solving many of the ills in our society. First of all, I think that we all wish that schools and colleges were actually doing this. But, they have usually become the repositories of knowledge rather than wisdom, questioning whether there even is a right and wrong rather than teaching it. Secondly, the philosophers, particularly of Western Civilization, have wrestled with the human condition and questions of virtue and have important things to teach us. Thirdly, Jefferson specifically addresses Aristotle and his idea that we must practice virtue to let it become a habit ~ we would be wise to habituate our youth – not to mention ourselves – to virtue. 

But, Jefferson’s answer is also partly unsatisfying. It is perhaps not the whole truth, particularly when we look at the Revolutionary generation and the Founding Fathers themselves. In his “Farewell Address,” Washington says that we must be cautious in simply believing that education in an Age of Enlightenment will make men virtuous. He says, “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in the exclusion of religious principle.” 

Religion is the foundation upon which Washington and many others believed virtue and morality to be rooted upon. Indeed, as I point out in my book, Hurricane of Independence, it followed a very logical path: religion was the basis for virtue and virtue was the basis for a free people to govern themselves. Take any element out and the experiment in republican liberty would collapse and fail. 

Washington continued, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” They were “great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.” He gave this warning: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” 

General George Washington and Congress had done precisely that during the Revolutionary War. When Washington went to Boston and assumed command of the army in 1775, he found New Englanders “an exceeding dirty and nasty people” and disliked their licentiousness. He sought to unify these soldiers from all over the colonies and instill a common spirit of virtue. He prevented them from skinny-dipping in front of ladies and other offenses, but more seriously required them to attend religious services and allowed to appoint chaplains. His messages are filled with exhortations to religious practice and virtue. 

The Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia went to pray and worried about their plurality. After all, there were Episcopalians, Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and in time a Catholic. The divisions among these groups were often deeply-rooted. Sam Adams rose and stated what would become a principle: “He was no bigot, and could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue, who was at the same time a friend to his country.” Congress attended religious services and had chaplains pray from different denominations and faiths. And, they weren’t the milquetoast, almost meaningless prayers of today at graduation ceremonies that are routinely declared unconstitutional. Congress declared days of thanksgiving as well as days of fasting and prayer. 

When he became president, George Washington firmly believed that he supported the idea that religion was the basis of virtue and virtue was the basis of good citizenship. Yet, he also had a firm belief in religious tolerance and religious liberty in a pluralist and free nation in his several letters to various religious groups who wished him well. While Thomas Jefferson is generally given the credit for religious tolerance, Washington did at least as much, if not more, for its cause. 

He wrote to the General Assembly of Presbyterian Churches: “While all men within our territories are protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of their consciences, it is rationally to be expected of them in return . . . the innocence of their lives and the beneficence of their actions.” He praised them for their “laudable endeavors to render men sober, honest, and good citizens.” 

He wrote to the Annual Meeting of Quakers: “The liberty enjoyed by the people of these states of worshipping Almighty God agreeably to their consciences, is not only among the choicest of their blessings, but also of their rights.” 

He wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” 

Washington’s wisdom resonated across the land and I think still resonates today. As a society, we have forgotten that freedom is not licentiousness, not an opportunity to let loose the mortal passions within. Patrick Henry warned that “Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.” 

Rather, it is an ordered liberty and self-government is rooted on virtue and morality which is rooted in religion. We need not tell a man how to worship God, for he has religious liberty, but we hope that he does worship God. Religious liberty and religious practice were essential pillars of the American Revolution. We shall hardly remain a “city upon a hill” should we forget that. As Patrick Henry also said, “No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” 

We shall allow John Adams to have the last word: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.” We should stop promoting “values” which are only what the individual values, they are soft and relative. Let us each embrace the virtue spoken of by Washington and our Founders and reclaim our republic!

J. Reuben Clark, Jr. and the Constitution

Joshua Reuben Clark, Jr. was born on September 1, 1871 in Grantsville, Utah to Joshua Reuben Clark and Mary Louisa Wolley Clark. He graduated in the first class at the University of Utah in 1898 and married Luacine Annetta Savage in September of that year. They became the parents of three daughters and one son. In 1903 Clark moved his family to New York City to attend the law school at Columbia University, where he graduated with an LL.B. degree in 1906. He excelled in law school and was elected to the editorial board of the Columbia Law Review. During his public career from 1906 to 1933, Clark served as assistant solicitor, solicitor, and undersecretary of the U. S. State Department, taught as an assistant professor of law at George Washington University, and crowned his public career by serving as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. It was during his service as undersecretary of the State Department that he published his influential “Clark Memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine.” 

In July 1935, J. Reuben Clark, Jr. spoke at a luncheon at the California Club on the subject of the Constitution, and said in part: “ We are deaf today to the approach of tyranny because we have lived so long under the protection of the Constitution that we take for granted the blessings of liberty . . . . We need more people today with strong convictions in support of the Constitution and with courage to back their convictions.”  J. Reuben Clark, Jr., “Stand Fast by Our Constitution” (Deseret Book Co. 1973), p. 4 (cited herein as “Clark”). 

He was a devoted and life-long student of history and of the roots of the American founding. With particularity he studied the Roman legal system and its progeny. From this background, he viewed the Constitution “as emerging from a long historical process. . . . [and saw] the framers of the Constitution as being men of great historical knowledge as well as practical experience.” He said: 

The Framers of our Constitution . . . were trained and experienced in the Common Law. They remembered the barons and King John at Runnymede. They were thoroughly indoctrinated in the principle that true sovereignty rested in the people. . . . Deeply read in history, steeped in the lore of the past in human government, and experienced in the approaches of despotism which they had, themselves, suffered at the hands of George the Third, these patriots, assembled in solemn convention, planned for the establishment of a government that would ensure to them the blessings they described in the Preamble. (Clark, p. 145, 147). 

Yes, he revered the Framers, and describing them said, “[a]s giants to pygmies are they when placed alongside our political emigres and fellow travelers of today, who now traduce them with slighting word and contemptuous phrase.” (Clark, pp. 135-36).         

A key feature of the Constitution important to J. Reuben Clark was the Bill of Rights, and particularly the First Amendment. He observed that “the greatest struggle which now rocks the whole earth more and more takes on the character of a struggle of the individual versus the state.” (Martin B. Hickman, “J. Reuben Clark, Jr.: The Great Fundamentals,” BYU Studies 13:3 (1973), p. 257 (cited herein as “Hickman”). In this regard, “he was particularly concerned with the protection of the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment: freedom of the press, of speech, and of religion.” (Id.) His firm opinion was that, “the fathers felt that when they protected freedom of speech and of the press against government interference, they had effectively guaranteed the citizens freedom to talk and write as they felt and thought about their own government” (Id., p. 269), and that this was essential to a free society. 

In describing the concept of federalism inherent the Constitution (see 9th & 10th Amendments), J. Reuben Clark emphasized that there is a dual jurisdiction in our Constitutional form of government -- State and Federal. He felt strongly that a limited federal government is what the Founding Fathers clearly intended in the Constitution, and that  “local government governs best.” He said: 

The Federal Government may only do what we the people have authority to do; if it does more it is guilty of usurpation. The people have reserved to themselves or to their State governments every right and power they have not delegated to the Federal Government, which must always look to the Constitution and its amendments to find its rights, for it has none other. This system puts the great bulk of our daily life activities in the hands of our own neighbors who know us and our surroundings, and not in the hands of a bureaucrat in a far-away national capitol, who, to all intents and purposes, is an alien to us and our affairs. This plan gives the largest possible measure to local self government. Liberty will never depart from us while we have local self-government controlling and directing matters pertaining to our personal liberties and to the security of our private property; it will not abide with us if we lose our local self government. (Clark, pp. 187-88). 

In regard to an informed society, Clark continually stressed the need for all American citizens to “constantly review the purposes for which the Constitution was written.” (Id., p. 271). He taught that our patriotic allegiance should not run to individuals or government officials “no matter how great or small they may be,” but that the only allegiance we owe as citizens runs to our Constitution. He stated that “this principle of allegiance to the Constitution is basic to our freedom.” (Clark, p. 189). He decried “those who . . . are incapable of understanding or appreciating the fundamentals of, or to think practically and creatively about, the problems of free self-government.” He expressed the conviction that “those who understand the spirit as well as the word of the Constitution will be able . . . to preserve its great principles and the republican form of government for which it provides.” (Clark, p. 158). 

With respect to the founding documents with which every citizen should be familiar and conversant, J. Reuben Clark was a diligent student of the history of the founding and particularly the Federalist Papers. He made the statement (in agreement with Thomas Jefferson) that “these essays have been appraised as ‘the greatest treatise on government that has ever been written,’ and its writers have been ranked as of the same order with Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Locke.” (Id., p. 135). He quoted Fiske stating that, “for all posterity the Federalist must remain the most authoritative commentary upon the Constitution that can be found.” (Id., p. 167). He also loved George Washington's poignant Farewell Address, and described it as a “prophetic admonition and warning.” He frequently quoted excerpts from the address when writing or speaking on the meaning of the Constitution and earnestly recommended to his listeners “to read it in its entirety.” 

In connection with Constitutional learning and vigilance, he vigorously urged each citizen to be watchful and to discern gradual encroachments to our liberties under the Constitution. James Madison stated: “I believe that there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” Echoing Madison's admonition, J. Reuben Clark offered this solemn warning: 

In the whole history of the human race, from Adam until now, Tyranny has never come to live with any people with a placard on his breast bearing his name. He always comes in deep disguise, sometimes proclaiming an endowment of freedom [or rights], sometimes promising to help the unfortunate and downtrodden, not by creating something for those who do not have, but by robbing those who have. But Tyranny is always a wolf in sheep's clothing, and he always ends by devouring the whole flock, saving none. (Clark, p. 5). 

John Quincy Adams and the Amistad case, 1841

 “On July 1, 1839, fifty-three Africans, recently kidnapped into slavery in Sierra Leone and sold at a Havana slave market, revolted on board the schooner Amistad. They killed the captain and other crew and ordered the two Spaniards who had purchased them to sail them back to Africa. Instead, the ship was seized off Long Island by a US revenue cutter on August 24, 1839. The Amistad was then landed in New London, Connecticut, where the American revenue cutter’s captain filed for salvage rights to the Amistad’s cargo of Africans. The two Spaniards claimed ownership themselves, while Spanish authorities demanded the Africans be extradited to Cuba and tried for murder. 

Connecticut jailed the Africans and charged them with murder. The slave trade had been outlawed in the United States since 1808, but the institution of slavery itself thrived in the South. The Amistad case entered the federal courts and caught the nation’s attention. The murder charges against the Amistad captives were quickly dropped, but they remained in custody as the legal focus turned to the property rights claimed by various parties. President Martin Van Buren issued an order of extradition, per Spain’s wishes, but the New Haven federal court’s decision preempted the return of the captives to Cuba. The court ruled that no one owned the Africans because they had been illegally enslaved and transported to the New World. The Van Buren administration appealed the decision, and the case came before the US Supreme Court in January 1841. 

Abolitionists enlisted former US president John Quincy Adams to represent the Amistad captives’ petition for freedom before the Supreme Court. Adams, then a 73-year-old US congressman from Massachusetts, had in recent years fought tirelessly against Congress’s “gag rule” banning anti-slavery petitions. Here, Adams accepted the job of representing the Amistad captives, hoping he would “do justice to their cause.” Adams spoke before the Court for nine hours and succeeded in moving the majority to decide in favor of freeing the captives once and for all. The Court ordered the thirty surviving captives (the others had died at sea or in jail) returned to their home in Sierra Leone.”[1]

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Closing Argument of John Quincy Adams before the Supreme Court, February 23, 1841 

 “I said, when I began this plea, that my final reliance for success in this case was on this Court as a court of JUSTICE; and in the confidence this fact inspired, that, in the administration of justice, in a case of no less importance than the liberty and the life of a large number of persons, this Court would not decide but on a due consideration of all the rights, both natural and social, of every one of these individuals. I have endeavored to show that they are entitled to their liberty from this Court. I have avoided, purposely avoided, and this Court will do justice to the motive for which I have avoided, a recurrence to those first principles of liberty which might well have been invoked in the argument of this cause. I have shown that Ruiz and Montes, the only parties in interest here, for whose sole benefit this suit is carried on by the Government, were acting at the time in a way that is forbidden by the laws of Great Britain, of Spain, and of the United States, and that the mere signature of the Governor General of Cuba ought not to prevail over the ample evidence in the case that these negroes were free and had a right to assert their liberty. I have shown that the papers in question are absolutely null and insufficient as passports for persons, and still more invalid to convey or prove a title to property…my argument in behalf of the captives of the Amistad, is closed. 

May it please your Honors: On the 7th of February, 1804, now more than thirty-seven years past, my name was entered, and yet stands recorded, on both the rolls, as one of the Attorneys and Counsellors of this Court. Five years later, in February and March, 1809, I appeared for the last time before this Court, in defence of the cause of justice, and of important rights, in which many of my fellow-citizens had property to a large amount at stake. Very shortly afterwards, I was called to the discharge of other duties--first in distant lands, and in later years, within our own country, but in different departments of her Government. 

Little did I imagine that I should ever again be required to claim the right of appearing in the capacity of an officer of this Court; yet such has been the dictate of my destiny--and I appear again to plead the cause of justice, and now of liberty and life, in behalf of many of my fellow men, before that same Court, which in a former age I had addressed in support of rights of property I stand again, I trust for the last time, before the same Court--"hic caestus, artemque repono." I stand before the same Court, but not before the same judges--nor aided by the same associates--nor resisted by the same opponents. As I cast my eyes along those seats of honor and of public trust, now occupied by you, they seek in vain for one of those honored and honorable persons whose indulgence listened then to my voice. Marshall--Cushing--Chase--Washington--Johnson--Livingston--Todd--Where are they? …Where is the marshal--where are the criers of the Court? Alas! where is one of the very judges of the Court, arbiters of life and death, before whom I commenced this anxious argument, even now prematurely closed? Where are they all? Gone! Gone! All gone!--Gone from the services which, in their day and generation, they faithfully rendered to their country. From the excellent characters which they sustained in life, so far as I have had the means of knowing, I humbly hope, and fondly trust, that they have gone to receive the rewards of blessedness on high. In taking, then, my final leave of this Bar, and of this Honorable Court, I can only exclaim a fervent petition to Heaven, that every member of it may go to his final account with as little of earthly frailty to answer for as those illustrious dead, and that you may, every one, after the close of a long and virtuous career in this world, be received at the portals of the next with the approving sentence— “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”[2]

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[1] https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/john-quincy-adams-and-amistad-case-1841

[2] United States vs. The Amistad, 40 US 518 (1841); Adams' complete argument may be found at: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/amistad_002.asp  

[3] See also: Amistad, movie trailer (1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJFDOvGMD0U

Graphic of John Quincy Adams (L) and Joseph Cinqué (R), who led the revolt aboard the Amistad, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cinqu%C3%A9 

The Real American Revolution

From John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818

Mr Niles, 

The American Revolution was not a trifling or common Event. It’s Effects and Consequences have already been Awful over a great Part of the whole Globe. And when and Where are they to cease? 

But what do We mean by the American Revolution? Do We mean the American War? The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People. A Change in their Religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations. While the King, and all in Authority under him, were believed to govern, in Justice and Mercy according to the Laws and Constitutions derived to them from the God of Nature, and transmitted to them by their Ancestors— they thought themselves bound to pray for the King and Queen and all the Royal Family, and all the Authority under them, as Ministers ordained of God for their good. But when they Saw those Powers renouncing all the Principles of Authority, and bent up on the destruction of all the Securities of their Lives, Liberties and Properties, they thought it their Duty to pray for the Continental Congress and all the thirteen State Congresses, &c. 

There might be, and there were others, who thought less about Religion and Conscience, but had certain habitual Sentiments of Allegiance And Loyalty derived from their Education; but believing Allegiance and Protection to be reciprocal, when Protection was withdrawn, they thought Allegiance was dissolved. 

Another Alteration was common to all. The People of America had been educated in an habitual Affection for England as their Mother-Country; and while they Thought her a kind and tender Parent, (erroneously enough, however, for She never was Such a Mother,) no Affection could be more Sincere. But when they found her a cruel Beldam willing, like Lady Macbeth, to “dash their Brains out,” it is no Wonder if their filial Affections ceased and were changed into Indignation and horror. 

This radical Change in the Principles, Opinions Sentiments and Affection of the People, was the real American Revolution. 

By what means, this great and important Alteration in the religious, Moral, political and Social Character of the People of thirteen Colonies, all distinct, unconnected and independent of each other, was begun, pursued and accomplished, it is surely interesting to Humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to Posterity. 

To this End it is greatly to be desired that Young Gentlemen of Letters in all the States, especially in the thirteen Original States, would undertake the laborious, but certainly interesting and amusing Task, of Searching and collecting all the Records, Pamphlets, Newspapers and even hand Bills, which in any Way contributed to change the Temper and Views of The People and compose them into an independent Nation. 

The Colonies had grown up under Constitutions of Government, So different, there was so great a Variety of Religions, they were composed of So many different Nations, their Customs, Manners and Habits had So little resemblance, and their Intercourse had been so rare and their Knowledge of each other So imperfect, that to unite them in the Same Principles in Theory and the Same System of Action was certainly a very difficult Enterprise. The complete Accomplishment of it, in So Short a time and by Such Simple means, was perhaps a Singular Example in the History of Mankind. Thirteen Clocks were made to Strike together; a perfection of Mechanism which no Artist had ever before effected....

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms

“In America we may reasonably hope that the people will never cease to regard the right of keeping and bearing arms as the surest pledge of their liberty.” 

—St. George Tucker [1]

        “A foundation of our American republic is “the natural law principle that every human possesses certain inalienable rights. Inherent in this is a right to self-defense—that is, to forcibly resist infringements on inalienable rights. The right of the people to keep and bear arms, enshrined in the Constitution’s Second Amendment, is centered not on hunting or sport shooting but on this natural right of self-defense. It gives “teeth” to the promises of liberty, ensuring that attempts to reduce our natural rights to mere dead letters may be met with meaningful resistance.  

        The Framers and ratifiers of the Second Amendment did not operate in a philosophical or historical vacuum. In ratifying the Second Amendment, they built upon a strong foundation of inherited rights they had long possessed as Englishmen. A century before American independence, the Declaration of Rights of 1689 codified the right of English subjects to possess arms for their defense. Nearly contemporaneous to the American Revolution, famed English jurist William Blackstone listed the right of English subjects to possess arms for their defense as one of the principal barriers against violations of life, liberty, and property. This cherished right flowed from “the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, where sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.” 

        The right to keep and bear arms for self-preservation may vest in the individual, but it also secures a collective resistance against large-scale threats to liberty. The founding generation well understood that people who lack the means to defend and enforce their rights are not, in any meaningful sense, free. For centuries, ruling monarchs had often disarmed the general population and then employed professional armies or loyal “select” militias to impose their tyrannical rule on a defenseless people. In a very real sense, the war for independence from Great Britain started over King George III’s attempts to do the same. As colonial frustrations over repeated injuries to their rights and liberties reached a breaking point, the royal response grew progressively hostile and heavy-handed. Increasingly larger numbers of royal soldiers were sent to occupy Boston, not to protect the civilians from foreign threats, but to enforce controversial laws at bayonet-point and intimidate the colonists into submission. Ultimately, under orders from the King, General Thomas Gage led hundreds of well-armed professional troops to forcibly seize supplies of arms and gunpowder stored in some of the most disaffected areas of colonial America—the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord. The ensuing skirmishes between British regulars and colonial militiamen were a final “spark” that set the Revolution ablaze. Had the colonists allowed themselves to be widely disarmed—or had they not already been one of the most widely armed civilian populations in history—the Revolution would certainly have been doomed. 

        It is little wonder, then, that the Founders immediately sought to safeguard the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” in their new nation. Their foresight to guarantee a well-armed citizenry continues, even today, to ensure the “security of a free state.”[2]

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[1] William Blackstone, Commentaries (St. George Tucker Ed., Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. 1996) (1803). 

[2] Source for Text: https://www.heritage.org/the-essential-second-amendment/the-origins-the-second-amendment

Photo credit: Don Troiani https://www.dontroiani.com/

Copyright © Don Troiani All Rights Reserved.

Note: In District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that private citizens have the right under the Second Amendment to possess an ordinary type of weapon and use it for lawful, historically established situations such as self-defense in a home, even when there is no relationship to a local militia. 

See also: "The Battle of Athens: An Obscure American Revolution" (1946)

https://www.libertarianism.org/articles/battle-athens-obscure-american-revolution