Posted by
Bill Crawford on Monday, July 04, 2011 12:57:34 PM
America has not blown itself up for another year, and we now have 235 years of uninterrupted, stable transfer of power- something unprecedented in human history.
SSuch a track record is enough for many to take it as a bit of a given, as much abroad as here. It most certainly is not, as the Civil War should still teach us.
Going back further than that, there certainly was no smooth sailing in the process of “creating a new world”, as Ben Franklin would put it.
The negotiations leading up to the Declaration of Independence were fraught with acrimony, and were finally brought to fruition by the belligerence of King George III and the British Parliament.
The public arguments that finally led to the Constitution went on for years, and the divisions that still held after the document was ratified were made obvious in the varying directions of the Adams and Jefferson Presidencies. The first half century of our Republic is historically referred to as “the era of good feeling”, but there were ideological battles between hordes of strong willed men that went on until they died out.
This was our greatest generation, for many reasons. For other reasons, mostly to burnish the idea of the Constitution being a “living, breathing” document (that is, one adjustable to what we need today), our generation has for decades tried to diminish their
efforts. If this were simply a legal argument, it would be in the long tradition of public discourse here. I speak of the efforts to diminish them historically and personally.
Diminution number one: what the Founders did was simply part of the “Rights of Man” movement of the time. Yes,
the works of Locke and Rousseau precede our Revolution, the Founders had more to lose than anybody in the colonies at the time and they knew they were putting it all on the line (and would be targeted for death at British hands) for what they were doing. They managed to create a human experiment in government that we all live under today, and nothing in the musings of philosophy at the time countenanced anything close to that.
Two, they were all flawed men and don’t deserve the reverence. The fact that many of them were slave holders is held up as the biggest flaw of all. Oddly enough, the negotiations leading to the Constitution and the Federalist Papers are remarkably absent of holding slavery as a positive force. It was regarded as an economic reality strong enough to hold off slavery as a front and center issue, in order to further unity on other issues. It was regarded at the time as such a fractious problem that it was deliberately tamped. It can safely be argued that many in the Founder’s generation (including some prominent slave holders) became the core
of the first movement of Absolutism in this country.
In fact, the later decisions that led to slaves being legally regarded as three fifths of a person were not meant to condemn them to less than human status- it was a compromise that persuaded the South to stay with the new nation, but didn’t accord them the population increase that would have granted them a Congressional representative superiority that would have ensured that slavery maintained itself in perpetuity.
The notion that these newly recognized rights, the “inalienable” ones were made immortal by the birth of an assertion that they traveled a new path: not from the Creator to the government (or King) to Man, but from the Creator to Man directly, who would then lend those rights (and power) to the government at their electoral whim.
That got the attention of the Europeans, but we were still regarded by many there as naïve, and eventually we would all realize the way the world worked.
Then George Washington not only turned down the Kingship offer to be simply President, but after having been elected twice practically by acclimation, turned down a third term and walked away from power. I think that was the point that the Old World started taking our concept seriously.