Founders: Post 2

The Founders: Post 2

   In The Founders: Intro Essay, I mentioned that two of the four leaders I wrote about were absent from the Constitutional Convention.  Thomas Jefferson was in France, representing the 13 states.  John Adams was the minister to England.

   The Confederation was what the Second Continental Congress had morphed into during the Revolution.  The “shot heard ‘round the world” had been fired in 1775, the peace treaty signed in 1783, a long, arduous war for the colonists.   The Continental Congress rather slowly adopted the Articles of Confederation in 1781.  It was a loose confederation of the states during and after the Revolution.  The Confederation could not effectively guide, much less govern political and economic relations among the 13 new states.  By 1789, interstate commerce and comity among all were severely strained, and leaders persuaded the Confederation to call for a convention to deal with national relations in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  It soon became a convention at which the delegates would produce a new constitution for a new government.

   Thomas Jefferson was in Paris.  France had been an indispensable ally during the Revolution.  Franklin had gone to France in 1778 to negotiate a Treaty of Alliance and remained as minister to France to 1785.  Jefferson went to France as a commissioner to help negotiate commercial treaties, then succeeded Franklin as minister in 1785.

   He followed events in the United States as much as he could.  He offered advice that the government should not punish Daniel Shays and his followers too harshly over the Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts (1786-87). He worried about the absence of a bill of rights appended to the new constitution and he wished for term limits on the presidency written into it.  He was in France until late in 1789, observing the beginning of the French Revolution.  A man who fully embraced the philosophy of John Locke as shown in the Declaration of Independence, he had doubts that the French would succeed in establishing a republic. He suggested that they emulate England’s constitutional monarchy.

   Among the French revolutionaries were followers of the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).  He was the founder of another political ideal during the Enlightenment, the one called democracy.  His democracy is the sovereignty of the masses, diametrically opposed to liberalism.  According to him, the majority will is the supreme law; after all, the people are the voice of God.  The only right a minority holds is the right to become the majority.  The rights of the individual is under the control of the state; no minority can claim any rights of individual action beyond the control of the state.

   The first stage of the French Revolution consisted of the rise of the middle class.  The bourgeoisie had become the most powerful economic group in the nation.  They took over the government, proclaimed itself the National Assembly and wrote a constitution for France.  They did what Jefferson had suggested, model their government on the constitutional monarchy.  They adopted the liberal philosophy of Voltaire and Montesquieu, limited the power of government and supported individual rights; however, the new republic was taken over by democrats in the summer of 1792, ardent followers of the radical equalitarian doctrines of Rousseau.

   The 1792 Legislative Assembly voted to suspend the king and ordered the election of a National Convention to draft a new constitution, then they executed the king, and they promoted countrywide massacres of nobles in September of 1792 and the Reign of Terror occurred from summer of 1793 to the summer of 1794.  Accepted guesstimates place the executions at 20,000 persons from September 1793 to July 1794.  That is the story of applying Rousseau’s direct democracy.  The blood bath was ended when dictators rose up and sent Rousseau’s most dedicated democrats to the guillotine.

   People of today who call themselves liberals adore Rousseau as the original democrat, and they love his “noble savage” fantasy.  When confronted with the oppression of the individual that Rousseau trumpeted, they stoutly maintain that they stand for the rights of the individual; they have tried to combine the democracy of the romantic Rousseau and John Locke’s liberalism, which is the bedrock of the American Founders.  The sovereignty of the majority is antithetical to liberty for individuals.  The “liberals” ignore the logic and so do the media.  True believers express themselves loudly and are loyally repeated by the media. They conflate Rousseau’s romanticism (and then communists and socialists who love the sound of the “sovereignty of the masses” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat”) with the individual liberties in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights and they want to be called liberal.  So they have been called for many decades, but over time the meanings of terms in public discourse change again.

   The latest change has been this:  Liberals who want to be more open about their preference for the despotism of the masses to individual rights have reclaimed the name “Progressives”, a term used in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  In their philosophy, when the masses obtain their rightful sovereignty, the masses must be led and controlled by those who believe that they are superior to all others in knowledge and compassion.  The Progressives believe that they are the ones who have gone to the right schools, learned the right sciences, born with natural righteous and fully understand how best to direct democracy.  In their minds, their natural authority is superior to limited government as constructed in the US Constitution.  It is only right and righteous for them to have the power to govern absolutely, according to them.

   Turning back to the men absent from the Constitutional Convention: John Adams was in London during the summer of 1789, acting as minister to England.  He was very interested in and supportive of creating a stronger central government at home.  He had been one of the three men who negotiated the Treaty of Paris of 1783, a brilliant peace treaty for the Americans.  From the British Empire they won recognition as a sovereign nation, all the lands between the Great Lakes, the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, which had been closed to them in 1763, and the right to continue to fish off the coast of Canada.  In return they agreed to recommend to the states to urge their people to pay off their debts to English merchants and to urge the states to compensate Loyalists who had had their property confiscated during the Revolution.  Also, Adams had successfully persuaded Holland to recognize American independence and gave money to the Revolution.  He was born in Massachusetts in 1735 and died there on July 4, 1826, the same day on which Thomas Jefferson died.

  He was an energetic, rather nervous, short lawyer who defended the soldiers who were tried for the Boston Massacre; he owned a farm, wrote ceaselessly as an anti-British propagandist in newspapers during the revolutionary times, served in the Massachusetts Assembly, member of the Massachusetts Revolutionary Provincial Congress, delegate to the 1^st and 2^nd Continental Congresses, helped to draft the Olive Branch Petition, advised Jefferson on writing the Declaration and signed it, chaired the Board of War and Ordnance during the early years of the war, then helped negotiate the peace treaty, became Washington’s first vice-president and the second president of the United States.  He corresponded warmly with his wife, Abigail, a great deal, much of which was saved and has been very informative for historians.  Their son, John Quincy Adams, became the 6^th US president, then a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts for 17 years after his one-term presidency.

   In the 1790’s, he and Thomas Jefferson came at loggerheads over the fundamental issue of authority.  He was to become a Federalist, while Jefferson created the Democratic-Republican party.  The question lying between them was this one: Where does the consent of the governed lie, and who is entitled to rule? 

   That was and is the fundamental issue at hand in the colonies in 1775, during the Reign of Terror in France, and the issue at hand today.

   Delegates in Philadephia in 1789 debated that and had to settle on some answers, and we can try to see if their wisdom of 1789 can be employed today.

   Let me know what you think.

Another post next Sunday (if not earlier).

Pam