Rick Gray
What the Founders Knew
By
Jul 2, 2008 - 11:02:23 AM

This Friday, we celebrate the valiant decision of a few dozen well-to-do lawyers, farmers, and businessmen – all white males – to declare their independence from the world’s mightiest empire.

They presented their Declaration to the American people in ink, but it was ratified in blood on a hundred battlefields up and down the Atlantic seaboard, across the Appalachians, in the valleys of rivers piercing to the heartland of this continent.  

Those who bore the battle were not all wealthy, or white, or even male.  For the words of the Declaration announced more than the petty grievances of discontented elites, too long neglected by a mercantile empire.  

The Declaration set forth a new way of thinking about the relationship between individuals and their government – an idea rooted in Greek philosophy, Roman history, English Common Law, and nearly two centuries of colonial experimentation with self-government.
The idea had taken modern form in the writings of English Whigs, especially John Locke, whose second treatise On Civil Government had justified the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the rise of Parliamentary supremacy in England.

By the time the Founders offered their Declaration to the world, they had reason to hope that their countrymen would embrace this idea.  What was complex and obscure in Locke had been reduced to its essentials through a dozen years of imperial crisis – through essays in the colonial press, debates in colonial legislatures, and well-lubricated discussions in colonial taverns.

By July of 1776, few Americans – literate or illiterate – were ignorant of the idea which Jefferson restated in the Declaration.  Not every American embraced the new idea, but many did – among them a sufficient number willing to take up arms for it.

It is to these obscure heroes – as well as to the gentlemen Founders of Philadelphia – that this Friday is dedicated.

It has become a commonplace among Americans that our country stands for freedom and democracy all over the world.  It would surprise many Americans to learn how many of the Earth’s billions no longer accept that claim.  Often, I myself find it difficult to believe.   

But you could find no corner of this planet which has not been influenced by the great idea of those original Americans who – eleven score and twelve years ago – first declared to the world their determination to govern themselves.  

If the world doubts what America stands for today, it has little doubt about the idea for which our Founding generation risked life, fortune, and sacred honor.  

The meaning of that idea has grown and deepened since 1776.  We have proved that a society founded on individual liberty can embrace the equality of both sexes, many races, and a world of religious traditions.  The frontiers of equality are still contested terrain, but the great idea marches on.

At the same time, we Americans have lost our familiarity with much that provided context for the majesty of Jefferson’s words and the valor of Washington’s troops.

Our Founders knew their history — particularly the histories of ancient Greece and Rome, medieval England and modern Europe.

They knew and understood the evolutionary genius of the English Common Law – the judge-made law which so often proved superior to the decrees of kings and the acts of interested parliaments.

They had read Enlightenment philosophy – not the Cliffs Notes – making notes in the margins and working out its ideas in their writings, in formal debate, and in private conversation.

There was nothing vague or simplistic in the Founders’ philosophy. The ideas of the English Whigs had been sifted through a century of relative peace, tempered by a dozen years of imperial crisis, and forged on the battlefield.  

The Founders were a remarkable people – truly America’s “greatest generation.”  The fact that we occupy the same continent, call ourselves by the same name, and occasionally commemorate their deeds does not make us worthy to call ourselves their heirs.

Today, we know too little of our own history – much less the history that the Founders knew.  Few of us have read Locke or Montesquieu – or the competing ideas of Hobbes or Rousseau – much less wrestled with them.  Few among us – even the lawyers – know more than a smattering of the Common Law.

And our children – schooled with a neglect far from benign – will know even less.
To believe that we can understand America simply by living here, without studying our nation’s origins and founding texts, is akin to believing one can be faithful to the religion of one’s parents, without personally studying its history and sacred texts – without making a personal commitment in one’s own heart.

America was founded on the most sublime ideas ever to motivate political man.  Once, no one could doubt that America stood for those ideas – across the globe.

But until we commit – as individuals and as a society – to rediscovering that heritage – and claiming it as our own – we will never stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the generation that welcomed Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration on that first Independence Day.

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